Reviews

Landfill sites

The history of the world is contained in its waste. Back in the early 1900s, a city's waste included horse carcasses, coal ash, and street sweepings. Today it contains cosmetics, cleaning agents, and compact disc cases, and it mostly ends up in landfill sites. Friends of the Earth, in its Citizen's Guide to Municipal Landfills (www.foe.org/ptp/manual.html), calls modern waste "the detritus of modern civilisation."

While there is no dispute that landfills contain toxic chemicals, the health hazards remain controversial. Should we be concerned? After all, landfill sites, once they are full, are sealed with an impermeable cover that is supposed to stop or slow waste degradation. But on the web, there are plenty of sites arguing that the toxic byproducts can escape. The Action Center, a collective of activists in Philadelphia, maintains an impressive resource on landfill leaks (www.ejnet.org/landfills), including a link to a list of recent academic and popular publications on landfill safety (www.gfredlee.com/plandfil2.htm). A paper in this week's BMJ (p 363) adds to the growing evidence of an excess risk of congenital anomalies and low birth weight near landfill sites.

One of the joys of searching the web is that you get not only "the big picture" about a topic, but also some fascinating minutiae. With typical British understatement, the minutes of a local council meeting begin: "The community of Bletchley record [sic] that the WDA201 license site still smells" (http://members.netscapeonline.co.uk/westbletchley/report3.htm). The small US town of Brant has, it seems, fended off proposals for a local municipal landfill (http://nobrantfill.freeservers.com/). Maybe the anthropologist Margaret Mead was right in saying that we should "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" (www.quotegeek.com/Literature/Mead_Margaret).

Gavin Yamey, deputy editor, wjmWestern Journal of Medicine. 

gyamey{at}ewjm.com