Post: 7 October 2013
Update 17 October 2013: I’ve received a response from the Environment Agency by e-mail. Please see the end of the post.
Something peculiar … There may well be a perfectly good explanation, but I can’t think what it might be.
The Environment Agency (for England) has for quite some time maintained a mapping application on its website, called ’What’s In Your Backyard?’. WIYBY provides useful information to the public on a wide range of environmental themes, one of which is landfill sites (both active and historical).
A Mr Carroll has recently submitted a request (under the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations) for an explanation as to why the WIYBY information no longer includes the type of waste received at individual landfill sites.
Information on the location of sites is still displayed, but the landfill class for individual sites is no longer appended. These are the classes (derived from the EU Landfill Directive):
Hazardous waste - This is waste that may be harmful to human health or the environment e.g. asbestos, chemicals, healthcare waste, electrical equipment, lead-acid batteries, oily sludges and pesticides.
Non-hazardous waste - This may include municipal waste, general office waste and catering waste.
Inert waste - This is waste that does not undergo and significant physical, chemical or biological transformation such as construction and demolition waste.
From an environmental and regulatory perspective there’s obviously quite a difference between inert and hazardous waste. If I had a landfill site “in my backyard” I think I would want to know which class applied.
An experienced researcher could probably get that information for individual landfills by looking further afield. However it does seem rather odd that if the Environment Agency website was previously publicising the class for each landfill site it has now stopped doing so. Not very transparent …
Due to the dynamic nature of the WIYBY application it’s not possible to retrieve older versions of the landfill class information itself. However by comparing archived versions of the interface we can see that the functionality required to filter results based on landfill class seems to have been removed from the Environment Agency website sometime between 5 March 2012 and 7 September 2012:
Update (17 October 2013)
I have today received an e-mail from the Environment Agency in response to the above post. The EA says:
It appears that the data field describing the type of landfill site (hazardous, non hazardous and inert) was inadvertently omitted.
We are reinstating a description field which enables us to describe the type of landfill dependent on whether it is a former waste management licence (and should not be accepting waste) or is a Landfill Directive compliant landfill (and is able to operate). This will clarify to our customers whether an authorised landfill is able to accept waste or not.
The website “should be updated soon”.
It’s a bit difficult to understand how the omission could be inadvertent. Somebody must have noticed previously because the landfill class drop-down list was removed from the search page.
It does not sound as if the EA plans to simply revert to the previous functionality, so it will be interesting to see what the new description field looks like.
Update (18 December 2013)
I’ve now written a follow-up post: Environment Agency information about hazardous landfill sites: still some questions.
Landfill Site sign photograph by Adrian Cable (CC BY-SA 2.0)