Coastal erosion has exposed an old landfill site in Northumberland County, which is leaking waste onto Lynemouth Beach and into the sea. There are more than 1,200 coastal landfill sites in England. Photo: ITV News
Coastal erosion has exposed an old landfill site in Northumberland County, which is leaking waste onto Lynemouth Beach and into the sea. There are more than 1,200 coastal landfill sites in England. Photo: ITV News

By Kris Jepson
18 February 2019

(ITV News) – Exclusive: Residents have called on authorities to excavate an historic landfill site, which is leaking waste onto Lynemouth Beach and into the sea.

Northumberland County Council told ITV News it undertook a land reclamation in the early 2000s, which involved cleaning up the beach and landscaping the cliffside, but it said it no longer has the means to repeat the process, saying “the prospect of the County Council being able to afford to excavate it and remove it from sight is very, very slim.”

The Government said it has no plans to fund a coastal erosion scheme at Lynemouth and the Environment Agency said “ultimate responsibility for both the landfill site and coastal defences at Lynemouth Beach lies with the council.”

A group of volunteer litter pickers in Northumberland have told ITV News they are desperately concerned for the environment and wildlife in Lynemouth because of the erosion on the cliffside at an old colliery landfill site. […]

According to research carried out in August, 2018, by Queen Mary University of London and the Environment Agency, there are more than 1,200 coastal landfill sites in England and one third of these are situated near ecological sites.

The research suggests 10 per cent of these historic landfills will start eroding in the next 40 years. […]

Steve Lowe, of Northumberland Rivers Trust, said the River Lyne used to be a good trout river, but now due to debris there has been “a massive decline in the numbers of fish”.

Plastics get pretty much into the environment, at the lowest level and then go right up the food chain, so we do know they are getting into fish species in particular and I’ve also been doing some work on foamers along the coast and just little bits of plastic, they can snatch them off the top of the water, ingest and they get stuck inside their gullets, so they can’t actually feed and that means they end up dying. If you’ve got smothering going on that means there aren’t any shellfish, which means that there won’t be anything feeding on shellfish, which means that the birds and sea mammals can’t survive. […]

Steve Lowe, Northumberland Rivers Trust

The Council’s countryside and green spaces manager, Mike Jeffrey, said it is a problem the council inherited when it took ownership of the land in 2000

That landfill site probably comprises hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material, so the prospect of the County Council being able to afford to excavate it and remove it from sight is very, very slim. It would cost many, many millions of pound to do that. [more]

Mike Jeffrey, Northumberland County Council

Residents call for action over eroded landfill site on Lynemouth Beach