Landfill: yesterday, today and tomorrow

By Michelle Moran, Associate Director and Environmental Scientist, Egniol

I have spent more than thirty years working on landfill sites, and I still find the subject splits a room. When I was asked to speak at the recent North West Resources Forum at Kendal Town Hall on 10^th June 2026, I knew landfill could go one of two ways. It could be brushed aside as yesterday's problem, or it could spark a proper conversation about a part of our infrastructure that has never really gone away. Happily, it was the second. So I wanted to set down the heart of what I shared, for anyone who could not be in the room.

The story we tell ourselves about landfill

For years the public conversation has pulled in one direction. Zero waste to landfill became a rallying cry, and rightly we have pushed hard on reuse, recycling and recovery. Landfill tax has risen year on year and made landfill the most expensive disposal route by some distance. The intention was good. Make landfill costly, and people will throw away less.

The reality has been more complicated. When legitimate disposal becomes very expensive, some waste simply finds another way out. We have seen the result in the rise of waste crime, from large-scale illegal dumping through to the fly-tipping that blights communities and costs councils a fortune to clear. The cases that made the headlines were extreme, but they were a symptom of a wider problem. If we squeeze one part of the system without thinking about the whole, the pressure comes out somewhere else.

Landfill has not gone anywhere

Here is the part that often surprises people. There are more than 21,000 landfill sites across the UK, the vast majority of them long closed. In Wales there are only around 20 operational landfills left, but more than 1,500 legacy sites that still need understanding, monitoring and careful management.

A closed landfill is not a finished landfill. Gas keeps being generated for decades. Leachate keeps forming. Caps age, drainage silts up, and the ground settles. Somebody has to keep watching all of it, keep it compliant, and slowly guide each site towards the point where it is genuinely safe to walk away. That is the work I describe as going from monitoring to legacy, and it is what fills my days.

Modern landfill is an engineering discipline

If your mental picture of landfill is a hole in the ground with a bulldozer on top, it is worth updating. A modern engineered site is a carefully designed system of liners, caps, gas wells, leachate collection and monitoring networks. Balancing a gas field to a flare or an engine is closer to an art than a checklist. Managing leachate well can be the difference between a site that loses a fortune in tankering and one that controls its own risk and cost. None of this is simple, and none of it runs itself.

We have also come full circle in a way that should give us pause. After the Loscoe gas explosion in 1986, the industry learned hard lessons about landfill gas and about building near old sites. Yet today we are once again seeing development creeping closer to historic landfills. The question I put to the room was a blunt one. Have we learned nothing? The knowledge exists. We just have to make sure it is not lost.

The quiet crisis is people

The biggest risk to the sector is not regulation or technology. It is people. Many of us who learned this trade came up through schemes like the YTS, started on site as monitoring technicians, and built our understanding over decades. That generation is heading for retirement, and we are struggling to attract new people in to take their place.

Landfill is not seen as a career with a future, which is a real shame, because the work is varied, technical and genuinely important, and it offers a long and interesting career to anyone who takes it on. If we do not pass on the practical judgement that experience brings, we will be left managing complex, sensitive sites with thinner and thinner expertise. That should worry all of us.

Part of the answer, not the whole of it

So where does that leave landfill? My honest view is that it has to be brought back into the conversation rather than pushed out of it. Landfill is not the silver bullet, but it is part of the solution. It needs to sit inside the circular economy, partnered with reuse, recycling and recovery, not treated as the embarrassing relative we would rather not mention. Done properly, a functioning, well-run disposal route also takes pressure off the system that drives waste crime in the first place.

We should also remember what these sites can become. With careful closure and a credible evidence base, a closed landfill can be surrendered and given a positive second life: solar generation on a stable cap, restored habitat and nature recovery, or community space and recreation. At Penhesgyn on Anglesey, where Egniol has worked for more than two decades, we have helped move a complex site steadily towards exactly that kind of future.

From monitoring to legacy

That practical path is what we set out in our guide, From Monitoring to Legacy. It covers the three things every operator wrestles with: building a monitoring plan that satisfies the regulator, managing leachate and gas in a way that controls cost as well as risk, and planning early for closure and permit surrender. It is grounded in real site experience rather than theory, because that is what actually helps when you are standing on site trying to make a decision.

Landfill deserves to be back on the agenda for the right reasons. It is part of how we manage waste responsibly, it carries decades of legacy risk that will not manage itself, and it needs people who understand it. My thanks again to the NWRF for the chance to make that case, and to everyone who joined the conversation. I suspect we are not done talking about landfill just yet.

Michelle Moran is Associate Director and Environmental Scientist at Egniol, a Welsh-rooted, UK-wide engineering and environmental consultancy. Egniol's environmental team supports the full landfill lifecycle, from NRW-aligned monitoring and leachate and gas management to closure and permit surrender, alongside the firm's civil and structural engineering, geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering and planning teams. You can download the Egniol free guide, From Monitoring to Legacy, https://egniol.com/egniols-practical-nrw-guide-for-landfill-compliance-cost-control-closure/ and Michelle’s presentation slides from the NWRF Kendal event are available here.