Arnold Darlington

For those of you who only speak American, a “refuse tip” is a garbage dump. Published in 1969, this is mostly interesting for nostalgia value; there are a number of photographs of earnest-looking young students, clad in shorts, wandering around landfills investigating ecology. Something like that would presumably give the UK equivalent of OSHA the screaming heebie-jeebies nowadays.


Nature has an annoying way of not conforming to what humans consider “natural”, and the book is full of interesting examples – wildlife and plant life enthusiastically taking up residence in various places that the average person would consider “unnatural”. The author must be an entomologist – he includes several photographs of “mining” bees that have taken up residence in plastic tubing, a discarded kitchen appliance, and an automobile battery.


The book is not concerned with the technology of landfills, but you can gather something from casual comments. Landfill state-of-the-art in the UK at the time apparently including an impermeable cap (after closure) but no lining. Nowadays in the US (and I assume elsewhere) an landfill would to have an impermeable liner (usually several layers of 80-mil plastic interlayered with bentonite), a leachate collection system, daily cover with inert soil during use, and a final closure cap, also impermeable. The cap requires ongoing maintenance after closure and the owner must put funds to do this in escrow as a condition of their landfill permit. Vegetation on the cap gets mowed to insure that roots don’t penetrate the impermeable layer, and burrowing animals are obviously right out. While the landfill is still operating, management goes to great lengths to keep wildlife out. (I rode around with the “gull patrol” once; their weaponry includes pyrotechnics launchers and loudspeakers playing gull alarm and distress calls. I admit to a certain fascination in flinging stuff at seabirds; my OCD compels me to leave no tern unstoned). This raises the interesting possibility that some of the animals and plants described here have had an important part of their ecological niche eliminated, either during landfill operation or after closure.


The book also doesn’t discuss the microbial fauna and flora; there’s probably enough material there for a much thicker volume. There’s a contrarian school of thought that holds we are going about the landfill process all wrong. A state-of-the-art landfill is as completely isolated from “the environment” as possible; nothing inside decays, or only decays very slowly (this as been demonstrated by “archeological” excavations in modern landfills, that often find perfectly recognizable items, including foodstuff, decades after they were buried). The contrarians hold that we should set up landfills more like a modern sewage treatment plant; let the bacteria and fungi get to work on the stuff.


At any rate, this is not a book for those interested in landfill technology, but it’s an interesting description of an habitat that has now probably vanished.… (meer)