The UK’s Landfill Problem

The United Kingdom is currently being presented with a difficult situation, and one that all major nations should take as a warning for how things may go if they do not adapt recycling in to their lifestyles. While the United Kingdom has one of the biggest economies in the world, what it does lack is land – in fact, several US states have a larger land mass than the British Isles.

In the UK – and in most major first world countries – the conventional means of disposing of household and business waste is by using “land fill”. Essentially, land is dug up, waste is insert in to the hole and then the land is refilled. A fairly abhorrent practice, but so far the best that the world has come up with in terms of waste disposal.

The problem in the United Kingdom, however, is that their small land mass and their reliance on using landfill to dispose of waste has caused a problem. These two facts are not compatible, and before long (some say in as soon as seven years), the UK is quite literally going to run out of land to dispose their waste in. The consequences of this would be extreme; land previously dismissed for landfill use due to its heritage or attractive qualities will have to become the property of the waste of a nation, and there is also the unseemly fact that eventually even the ‘good’ land will run out.

The answer, of course, is recycling. When waste is recycled and used again, there is no need for it to ever grace the fields of a country and become part of a landfill.