Hazardous waste landfill sites and congenital anomalies.

he EUROHAZCON collaborative group reported a further stage of their research on connections between congenital anomalies and hazardous waste landfill sites in the November 2002 issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 1 An expert panel scoring method has been used to estimate the hazard potential of EUROHAZCON landfill sites and to investigate whether sites classified as posing a greater potential hazard are those with a greater risk of congenital anomaly among nearby, relative to distant residents. Municipal and hazardous wastes are an inevitable byproduct of developed societies. While the public are content to generate domestic waste in ever larger quantities, they appear very reluctant to face up to the realities of disposal, especially when proposals relate to their own neighbourhood. The greatest adverse reactions seem to centre on incineration , which is nowadays subject to very strict engineering and operational controls such that the health consequences of an incinerator for local populations should be extremely small. In opposing incinerators, environmental pressure groups generally stress the desirability of greater recycling and there are few that would deny that more could be done on this front. However, there is a limit to which components of waste can usefully be recycled, and not all recycled materials are of the same quality as those produced from virgin feedstocks. 2 There are also very real concerns over health impacts of recycling plants for workers and local residents, and over the com-posting plants which can deal with the putrescible materials within domestic waste. The last resort disposal option is landfill, and while the regulatory regime is now discouraging landfill, there will always be a role for it for materials which are not suitable for recycling, compost-ing, or incinerating, and particularly for hazardous wastes, including the air pollution control residues from incinerators which contain the toxic materials trapped to avoid emission to the atmosphere. Over recent years, UK practice has been towards co-disposal of hazardous waste and municipal waste in common landfills. In future, because of European regulations, this will not be possible. However, there is a large number of current or past co-disposal landfill sites across the country, and according to Elliott and colleagues, 3 80% of the population lives within 2 km of a current or closed landfill site. While the majority of these sites have probably not accepted hazardous waste, records for the older sites are poor or non-existent and it is hard to …