Tag: dump

January 29th – A horrible, grey, wet and misty day that had very, very little to commend it. I set out in rain, and came back in rain and there was no cessation between the two. 

My heavy heart was not helped at Chasewater, where some scumbag has dumped an old IBC full of what looks like kitchen fitter’s waste: now a repeat flytipping spot, the space next to the Nine-Foot wouldn’t be suffering if the council had put in a barrier years ago. There’s no reason for anyone except rangers to be here in a vehicle, after all.

The mess these filthy toe rags have left will cost us all to clean up. If you know who it was, please dob them in to the police.

March 2nd – Meanwhile, over in the layby at Coppice Lane, the flytippers had been busy. There must be 20 or 30 bags here – none were open, so I have no idea what was in them, but it looks like domestic refuse – all dropped in a pile, clearly from a van or truck.

The people that do this are criminals, and scum beneath contempt. If you know who did this, please dob them in to the Council or cops.

This stuff can present a health hazard and costs a fortune to deal with. Civilised humans don’t flytip.

February 23rd – Evidence of subterranean systems of an altogether more sinister nature can be found dotted around the borderlands of Walsall Wood, Shelfield and Aldridge. These odd enclosures – one in the fall towards the marl pit by the Brickyard Road canal bridge at Stubbers Green, and the other, on scrub near the end of Dumblederry Lane in Aldridge, are grim reminders of what lies beneath. They are access boreholes to the mine workings beneath, filled with millions and millions of gallons of toxic waste, dumped there after the mines closed. The dumping, over the course of a couple of decades, was freeform and barely regulated. The current operators of the site from which this dump is accessed manage it carefully. The boreholes, of which there are a number, are fenced and secured for obvious reasons. The one at Dumblederry lane has a breather valve fitted, to vent gas safely into the atmosphere.

May 2nd – Heading off the canal at Leighswood Bridge there’s a footpath that somehow, against huge odds, has managed to stay open despite wending a precarious way between Europe’s largest inland toxic waste facility and an immense marlpit.

The red marls that have been opencast here for centuries made the area of Aldridge and Stubbers Green famous for it’s brickworks and tileries, producing high-quality engineering bricks and building materials that an entire industrial revolution was built out of.

These days, marl is excavated in an almost robotic process. An excavator works down the face in terraces, and four huge trucks are filled in a constant relay, each carrying three excavator bucketfuls to the Wienerberger brickworks up top. At the base of the excavation, there’s a pool of drainage water. This is returned to a settling lagoon on the surface by a pump, floating on a raft, cleverly made out of empty drums. Note that the marl itself is quite dry, and not the clay-like material one would expect. Impervious to water, it makes an ideal void into which landfill of most grades can be dumped when the opencast is exhausted. This area is surrounded by landfill sites utilising former marl pits, and under it all, millions upon millions of gallons of toxic slurry dumped in the deep coal workings that also riddled the landscape. 

There’s nothing so valuable as a hole in the ground.

In many countries, this would be considered environmental destruction. Here in the UK, we call it industry.

February 26th – Since we’re on a bit of a refuse theme today, as I trundled up the canal to Aldridge, I stopped to look at the gulls, crows and jackdaws scavenging on the Highfields South Landfill, just behind Barons Court in Walsall Wood. This is the reality of our waste problem, and Walsall Wood and Brownhills have plenty of landfill sites. A hole has been dug – in this case, for brick marl – leaving a large, watertight void. Ideal for dumping our rubbish. Highfields is filling at an alarming rate – what’s under that vehicle looks like a combination of domestic and industrial general waste with what appears to be incinerator ash. Carrion birds are picking over the food waste. It stinks. And we can’t keep doing this. We have to cut the waste we generate. Nobody wants to live near a landfill – and the space within them is reducing, week by week. Yet mention bin regulation or recycling and we’re up in arms. It’s as if we can’t see the connection. I find it utterly depressing.