Rubbish disposal

We produced over 123,000 tonnes of household waste in the Plymouth City Council area in 2007 to 2008. Of this over 85,000 tonnes went to landfill. We used to landfill our rubbish at the Chelson Meadow recycling centre landfill site here in the city, but this is now full. We have signed a seven-year contract with Viridor to send our non-recycled waste to a landfill site in Cornwall. Our waste is taken there by trucks.

Disadvantages of landfill

Putting rubbish in a landfill site (or hole in the ground) has some disadvantages:

• Methane gas is produced (a major contributor to global climate change)
• Leachate is produced. Leachate is very high in nutrients and can contain pollutants from the items that were in the landfill site, for example heavy metals from TVs and batteries
• It attracts vermin such as rats and seagulls
• Resources are lost forever
• Litter

Legislation

New European legislation means that each country has been given challenging targets to reduce the amount of waste that it sends to landfill. The UK government has given each council in the country a set allocation of how much rubbish it can put into a landfill site each year until 2020. If we go over our allowance, we could be fined. The fines could be millions of pounds, so it is essential that we recycle as much as possible and look for other waste disposal options for the waste that can’t be recycled.