Mucking Marshes Landfill
former landfill site near London
Mucking Marshes landfill was a major landfill site servicing London, close to the hamlet of Mucking, in Thurrock, Essex. Covering hundreds of acres of former gravel quarry, it was one of the largest landfills in Western Europe and had been filled for decades with municipal and commercial waste floated thirty miles down the River Thames in barges to Mucking Wharf. The barges, each carrying dozens of distinctive yellow containers, were a familiar, though rarely commented-upon, sight along the Thames through Central London. Once the barges had travelled 30 miles (48 km) downstream from Walbrook Wharf (or further upstream at Wandsworth), mechanical cranes at Mucking Wharf unloaded the containers onto trucks. The trucks made their way up the artificial mound created by decades of garbage compaction that still towers over the surrounding flat landscape. Flocks of seagulls and other scavenging estuarine birds were a familiar sight as the trucks disgorged their contents.
The former landfill site itself, although it dominates the village of Mucking, is guarded and surrounded by a perimeter fence more than four miles (6 km) long. Cory Environmental, the operators of the site, gated off Mucking Wharf Road so that views of the Thames meeting the North Sea could only be accessed via a circuitous footpath through the neighbouring village of East Tilbury.
Conversion to a nature park
Changes in London governance, including the creation of the Greater London Authority under Ken Livingstone, led to indications of a reassessment of London's waste strategy based more on recycling and less on landfill sites like Mucking Marshes. However, in 2007, Mucking Marshes Landfill was granted an extension to receive London's waste until 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mucking Marshes Landfill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.