The Guardian reports that seventeen landfills across England are known to be producing a highly toxic liquid substance containing some banned and potentially carcinogenic “forever chemicals”, in some cases at levels 260 times higher than that deemed safe for drinking water.

However the government says it does not know where these landfills are.

Over a 10-month period from 2021 to 2022, consultants working for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency were asked to take samples from a “number of different operational and closed landfills” developed between the 1960s and the present day in order to provide an “overall picture” of the chemical substances found in the landfills’ leachate.

The results of the sampling, published in an Ends Report investigation and shared with the Guardian, reveal that in one landfill, the total sum of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the raw leachate sample was 105,910 nanograms a litre (ng/l).

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