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Seventeen landfills in England make toxic liquid hazardous to drinking water
(www.theguardian.com)
Only 17?
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Seventeen landfills across England are known to be producing a highly toxic liquid substance containing some banned and potentially carcinogenic “forever chemicals”, in some cases at levels 260 times higher than that deemed safe for drinking water, it can be revealed.
The data provided to Ends revealing the high levels of PFAS in the landfill leachate did not include location information, meaning it is not possible to assess their potential to contaminate drinking water sources.
This, they said, was because the purpose of the study was to “build an initial nationwide (England) picture of substances in landfill leachate that are known to be or suspected to be harmful to the environment”.
Dr Shubhi Sharma, scientific research assistant at campaign group Chem Trust, said it was “extremely worrying” that the Environment Agency “claims not to know the locations of landfills where high levels of PFAS have been found in leachate”.
Penelope Gane, the head of practice at campaign group Fish Legal, said: “You would have thought that someone in the Environment Agency would be sitting up and taking notice with PFAS readings coming back hundreds of times higher than safe limits for drinking.
The Environment Agency has said that most of the sites targeted by the survey were operational landfills, receiving household and commercial waste which have containment systems to prevent leachate escaping into the ground or groundwater.
The original article contains 1,099 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
My city's giant landfills have clay liners that redirect the leachate to a treatment plant specifically for the purpose. The leachate literally flows into the plant constantly, it's a huge amount.
I only know this because I worked there in my early 20s. It had the most horrifying smell like a fully fermented Diaper Genie poop-snake with strong sweet and sour notes that seemed to have flavour.
I got used to the smell at the regular waste water treatment plant, and at the dump in general, but the leachate plant was unbearable.