Coastal Landfills and Rising Sea Levels: A Challenge for the 21st Century

Abstract

Populated coastal areas worldwide have a legacy of numerous solid waste disposal sites. At the same time, mean sea level is rising and likely to accelerate, increasing flooding and/or erosion. There is therefore concern that landfill sites located at and near the coast pose a growing risk to the environment from the potential release of liquid and solid waste materials. This paper aims to assess our present understanding of this issue as well as research and practice needs by synthesizing the available evidence across a set of developed country cases, comprising England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States (Florida). Common insights gained here include: (1) a lack of data and limited appreciation of waste release from coastal landfill as a potential problem; (2) recognition of the scale and diversity of coastal landfill waste within a range of generic settings (or situations); and (3) a lack of robust protocols that allow the impact of different categories of waste release to the coast to be assessed in a consistent and evidence-based manner, most particularly for solid waste. Hence, a need for greater understanding of the following issues is identified: (1) the amount, character and impact of waste that could be released from landfill sites; (2) the acceptability and regulation of waste eroding from coastal landfills; (3) present and future erosion rates at landfill sites suggesting the need for more monitoring and relevant predictive tools; (4) the full range of possible management methods for dealing with waste release from landfills and the science to support them; and (5) relevant long-term funding mechanisms to address this issue. The main focus and experience of current management practice has been protection/retention, or removal of landfills, with limited consideration of other feasible solutions and how they might be facilitated. Approaches to assess and address solid waste release to the marine/coastal environment represent a particular gap. Lastly, as solid waste will persist indefinitely and sea levels will rise for many centuries, the long timescale of this issue needs wider appreciation and should be included in coastal and waste policy.

A typology of responsibility for coastal flood risk adaptation

“…There are concerns around poor support for communication and clarity in the allocation of responsibility, the need to increase capacity and information for household adaptation, and of the equity and effectiveness implications of expecting householders to be "flood risk citizens" or local stakeholders to hold significant FRM responsibilities (Nye et al, 2011;Elrick-Barr et al, 2016;Begg et al, 2017a;Thistlethwaite et al, 2020). When we do not know who is responsible what type of responsibility they hold, issues arise such as that now recognized around seaside landfills (Nicholls et al, 2021):…”

Human–coastal coupled systems: Ten questions

“…That means whatever we see now in the coastal zone will still be there, left to get torn apart by decades of storms: beach houses, with garages full of solvents and paint and weedkiller and septic tanks somewhere under the sand; motel units and hotel blocks and strip malls and box stores; roadbeds and utility wires and storm drainage and everything else constructed that people live in and among (Weisman, 2007). This manifestation of coastal pollutionone derived directly from patterns of market-driven real-estate development on low-lying coastal floodplainsis distinguished from, but not unrelated to, more conventional and ubiquitous forms of coastal pollution, including agricultural runoff, sewage discharge, and the exposure of waste-storage landfill sites deliberately sited in areas prone to coastal erosion (Rabalais et al, 2010;Nicholls et al, 2021;Tuholske et al, 2021).…”

Mobilizing materials to enable a fast energy transition: a conceptual framework

“…In the best case it may be lower than for current primary production, as some legacy tailings are expected to have higher concentrations than currently mined deposits, but generally it can be expected to be higher. Proper management of landfills and mining wastes is inevitable for reducing ecological risks (Nicholls et al, 2021), and regain land area (Winterstetter et al, 2018). Compared to "increase", access, such as through roads or to permits, may be easier.…”