How the BBC's 'Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History' Changed my Perceptions

Last week, I saw an ad for BBC4's documentary Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History and, as with many TV programmes, I thought I'd hop and skip through it and move on. However, the programme really did grab my attention and I'd recommend your taking 90 minutes to sit down and watch it.

Essentially, the programme shows how the rubbish we've been chucking out and burying in landfill sites for the past 150 years and more is building up under our feet and is gradually coming back to bite us.

The programme makers dug up and examined various landfill sites to see what's happened to rubbish since it was dumped.

It showed how calculations about how even things that most of us assume will rot away in a heartbeat, like a newspaper, don't meet the expected decomposition times. A newspaper is expected to decompose in 2-6 weeks. They found one in a 30 year old landfill (ie before recycling was common) that looked the same as the day it was thrown away. Apparently they hadn't figured the lack of oxygen into their calculations. Imagine what this might mean for rubbish for which much longer decomposition times have been calculated.

The programme also explained how landfill rubbish creates a kind of stew and exudes a leachate which is essentially a disgusting liquid incorporating all the stuff that goes into landfill, much of which is highly toxic. It includes harmful stuff like the chemicals in batteries and all the other stuff that households and businesses throw away.

One of the landfills examined was from the 1960's. In a masterstroke of forward thinking, it was sited next to the Thames estuary. The programme showed how the river current is now washing away the landfill and sending it out to sea.

The programme was a scary reminder of how we're wrecking our planet. I recycle and try to act responsibly, but I've never been a card carrying greenist, nor even a pale imitation of one. Watching this programme though gave me a useful reminder of the need to be more responsible. The first thing I'm changing is to stop being lazy with my batteries. I've now put out a container for them and will drop them off in Sainsbury's when I have a few to recycle. (And, as a step in the wrong direction, I've already stopped recycling any black plastic food trays we get since I read that they can't be recycled because their colour means that they can't be 'read' by the recycling machines. I guess as a next step I should refuse to buy anything in a black plastic tray).

You can can catch the programme on iPlayer for another three and a half weeks. If we can all change our habits just a bit, it'll help. But I was left with the impression that as a society we need to do a darn site more before long - and soon.