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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies coastal erosion, increased flooding and salinisation as risks related to sea level rise. But there’s another hidden impact of sea level rise which some researchers say is worse than flooding.
We’re too familiar with disappearing coastlines, properties falling into the sea and increased flooding thanks to sea level rise. But the rising seas are causing more concern: coastal landfill sites pose a growing risk to the environment from the potential release of waste materials as landfill sites erode or flood from sea level rise.
“Solid wastes like asbestos, plastics and batteries could be released that would cause physical damage to marine biota through ingestion, abrasion and entanglement,” says Robert Nicholls, a researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.
Early landfill sites might contain toxic liquid and solid waste that was received before there were regulations, and the effects can be long-lasting because many waste products aren’t biodegradable.
Solid waste in landfill sites have a geological longevity. This makes them worse than the liquids which diminish over time.
Sea-level rise and climate change exacerbate the risks of erosion and flooding of landfills.
“The potential erosion of old landfills in coastal zones is more significant and a greater problem to solve than the issue of flooding, which will worsen with sea-level rise,” says Richard Beaven, co-author, and author of a separate study in 2020 that looked at the challenges facing coastal landfills in the face of sea level rise.
Sea level rise is predicted to continue for centuries, so coastal landfill erosion is a long-term problem which won’t go away if nothing is done. It’s a ticking time bomb that’s set to get worse in time.
In a paper published in September 2021, Nicholls’ team set out to assess the present understanding of the implications of the release of waste materials from landfills into the environment.
The team looked across a set of developed country cases in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States (Florida). They surmised that there is insufficient appreciation of the scale and implications of waste release to the coastal and marine environment, including the impact of sea level rise.
They also found a lack of robust protocols that allow the impact of wastes entering the marine environment to be assessed.
The paper draws attention to the public concern given to increasing volumes of plastic in the ocean, yet little is known about the risks of other solid wastes. Beaven says that the work carried out on plastics in the marine environment needs to be widened to include other kinds of solid materials in the sea.
Beaven’s 2020 study identified at least 60 coastal landfills in England and Wales that are threatened by erosion, and looked at potential mitigation options for three case studies in the south of England.
Nicholls and Beavens’ studies both found that the preferred option in shoreline management was to “hold the line” by building or upgrading artificial defences to maintain the current shoreline.
“The main focus and experience of current management practice has been protection/retention, or removal of landfills,” says Nicholls, “with limited consideration of other feasible solutions and how they might be facilitated.”
Appropriate adaptation is needed, and quickly.
“Managing the legacy of coastal landfills over the next century (and beyond) poses a significant challenge to coastal societies,” Nicholls says, “and our scientific tools to analyse these problems and the policies that are applied require significant enhancement.”
Nicholls concludes that while individual contexts from site to site vary, the results are generic and transferable widely.
References and Resources:
Nicholls R.J., Beaven R.P., Stringfellow A., Monfort D., Le Cozannet G., Wahl T., Gebert J., Wadey M., Arns A., Spencer K.L., Reinhart D., Heimovaara T., Santos V.M., Enríquez A.R. and Cope S. (2021) Coastal Landfills and Rising Sea Levels: A Challenge for the 21st Century. Front. Mar. Sci. 8:710342. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2021.710342
R.P. Beaven, A.M. Stringfellow, R.J. Nicholls, I.D. Haigh, A.S. Kebede, J. Watts (2020) Future challenges of coastal landfills exacerbated by sea level rise, Waste Management, Volume 105, Pages 92-101, ISSN 0956-053X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2020.01.027.
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-4-sea-level-rise-and-implications-for-low-lying-islands-coasts-and-communities (Accessed: 4 October 2021)
Paul Sterlini
