EHJ May 2004, pages 138-140
Residents of an idyllic west-country village allege that one of the UK's largest landfill sites may have mishandled dangerous incinerator ash. They also fear expansion of hazardous waste when new EU rules begin this summer. Will Hatchett reports

Caroline Watterston had no idea that she was living next to a toxic waste dump. The lorries that rumbled past her house in the middle of the night and the clunking noises as their contents were discharged into giant silos gave her a clue. But she had little idea what was in them.

Caroline had moved into a cottage called Wingmoor Lodge in the pastoral Severn Valley in 1996. The location could not have been prettier - from her windows she could see the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills. She rented her house from the waste disposal company Grundon. At the end of her back garden was a former gravel and sand quarry, also owned by the company. Wingmoor Farm was being used by Grundon to dispose of commercial and industrial waste, including incinerator residues.

Says Caroline: "I knew it was a tip but I didn't know that it was toxic. How we found out was when someone called Major Whittaker came up from Hampshire. He was trying to stop Grundon from dumping incinerator waste on another site that was definitely over an aquifer. They won their case. Anyway, he flew over Wingmoor Farm in an aeroplane and took aerial photographs. Major Whittaker came down and said 'did you know this was toxic?'. That was the first we knew of it."

If she had been ignorant before, from the internet and other sources, Caroline now learnt a great deal about air pollution control (APC) residues from incinerators. She discovered that Wingmoor Farm was taking fly ash from all over the country. She also found out that the ash contained traces of antimony, arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and nickel, as well as dioxins and furans, and that it must be handled extremely carefully.

At Wingmoor Farm, which has been operating as a landfill since 1990, the ash from half the country's incinerators is moved from sealed lorries into large green silos. Then it is mixed with water into a slurry. The local geology is good for waste disposal - there is a layer of blue lias clay up to 100m thick. The disposal technique is for the ash to be stored in "cells" dug from the clay.

Caroline alleges that equipment has been handled on site by workers without adequate protective clothing. She also says that ash has been allowed to blow around, close to where sheep graze and where ducks, geese and herons land on the clay-pit reservoirs, although EU regulations say that APC residue should not come into contact with living tissue.

She said: "I am concerned because I am not satisfied that this is the best available technique. Apparently, the government has spent £12m on researching better ways to deal with this ash  and dumping it out in the open air is not the best way. In the cities, not a bit of it is allowed to be spilt so why should we in the country be treated differently? In an ideal world we would not incinerate at all. But if we are going to do it, we should do it safely."

Caroline says that the smell from Wingmoor Farm was "diabolical" - "in the summer, you couldn't have your window open." A storm in November 2000 caused her windows to be covered with grey ash. She phoned the Environment Agency and the county council and they came around within an hour. However, to her disappointment, both refused to take away samples for analysis, saying that it could be clay dust.

Her son Brandon was born in 1997. Increasingly worried about what was going on at the bottom of her garden, she organised a public meeting in February 2001. Two days later, her tenancy was terminated by Grundon. Caroline moved to a nearby village, Bishop's Cleeve. But the tip was still on her doorstep. She says there are almost 10,000 houses in the expanding settlement north of Cheltenham. Some new developments are only 400m from Wingmoor Farm.

Caroline now helped to set up a group called Safety in waste and rubbish disposal, or Sward. She explains: "We are not a protest group. We are just local residents. And we are not Nimbys. We all produce rubbish and we know that it has got to go somewhere. We just feel that, in this case, it has not been disposed of properly". In the summer of 2001, she appeared on BBC's Newsnight, talking about the dangers of toxins from incinerator ash.

Frances Robinson, waste campaigner for Friends of the Earth in Gloucestershire, believes that Wingmoor Farm illustrates local and national concerns. She told EHJ: "In the past, there certainly have been serious questions about how toxic waste has been handled on site very close to residential areas and the residents have been very worried about the APC dust. I suspect that, because of Sward's activities, Grundon has improved the way they manage the site. That is a victory for the residents. But the big problem about the regulatory regime is that it is self-monitoring."

Grundon denies that ash has been improperly treated or handled at Wingmoor Farm. The company acknowledges that the site receives up to 60,000 tonnes of hazardous waste a year. A statement says: "Generally it has operated in harmony with the local community - including the substantial number of houses that were built after the site became operational". The company adds that regular environmental and health risk assessments are carried out. It claims that monitoring stations around the site indicate very low levels of dust so that "the site has no discernable impact on the environment or health to local residents". It also says that Health and Safety Executive tests show that the site is safe for employees.

Last year, Sward members received a shock. Grundon's waste management licence only runs to 2009, when the site is supposed to be remediated. But Grundon plans to increase and diversify waste disposal operations beyond that date. Proposals for neighbouring Wingmoor Quarry include materials recovery facilities for construction, household and commercial waste, a landfill gas power generator and a study centre.

It has also applied for a pollution prevention and control permit from the Environment Agency for Wingmoor Farm West to accept hazardous waste, including contaminated soils, packaging, filtercake and asbestos, under new EU regulations (see box). If permission is granted, asbestos waste would be mixed with incinerator ash and buried in trenches. Grundon says in a statement: "Currently the government has not yet resolved many of the technical issues relating to the future of hazardous waste management, so we cannot provide accurate assessments of either the quantity or types of waste that will be managed at the site".

Gloucestershire CC confirmed that permission has been granted for a methane flaring facility at Wingmoor Quarry. It says permission for materials recovery facilities will depend on a traffic impact assessment. Grundon is currently applying to add two more APC residue silos at Wingmoor Farm but a decision has yet to be taken.

Since then, a consultant appointed by Sward and Gloucestershire FoE, Alan Watson from Public Interest, has made a discovery that may throw the legality of Grundon's existing operations into doubt.

Ms Robinson explains: "The original planning permission has a clause in it that says that they cannot landfill hazardous waste, other than that which is deemed suitable under the waste management licence. At the time the county council was the planning authority, the waste disposal authority, the waste management authority and the regulatory authority, so presumably they thought that they would be looking after everything themselves." Any new planning permission, she says, would have to be drafted a lot more tightly.

Copies of the report have been sent to all bodies involved with the site. Gloucestershire CC said that it is taking legal advice on whether, under the terms of its 1989 planning permission, Grundon can legally dispose of hazardous waste at Wingmoor Farm. To extend any waste disposal beyond 2009, the company will either have to apply for variations of its three original planning permissions or make a whole new application. According to the council, "it is in the company's interest" to do that this year.

Regardless of the site's future after 2009, the Environment Agency is currently considering Grundon's application for a PPC permit for Wingmoor Farm West to accept hazardous waste from July. Providing that planning conditions are being complied with, say experts, it is likely to go through. Harvey Bradshaw, area manager for the Environment Agency, is on record as saying: "We are required to grant the permit to Grundon. The only way we wouldn't is if the waste would cause harm to the environment."

FoE's lawyers are pressing the agency to show them Grundon's draft permit, under the Freedom of Information Act. Campaigners are alarmed by the prospect of Wingmoor Farm accepting even more hazardous waste. They argue that if the council grants planning permission beyond 2009, far more rigorous requirements should be imposed than are now.

Caroline thinks that enough is enough. The site should be closed down and relandscaped. She says: "I trained as a landscape designer and I just feel that there can only be so much poison that one piece of land can absorb. It's like a great big poisonous pimple and I think that's enough. They've been dumping waste there for so many years. I think that now it should just stop."

Ms Robinson says that local people are not seeking financial compensation for nuisance, although this is a possibility in the wake of successful class actions around the Nantygwyddon and Trecatti landfills, in south Wales. She comments: "The people of Bishop's Cleeve are not looking for money. They want a good quality of life in the foothills of the Cotswolds, where they are not importing toxic waste from all over the country. And they want to ensure that what waste is deposited here is done safely and does not pose a risk either getting here or on site."