A new BBC Radio 4 documentary series called Buried is lifting the lid on the "astonishing crime you likely have not heard of".
Investigative environmental journalists Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor visited Mobuoy dump outside Derry and looked into the dumping of one million tonnes of illegal waste.
In their investigation, they discovered that the dump is the site of "a crime the likes of which the UK has never seen before".
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The first episode of Buried is titled 'A deathbed tape'. In the episode we hear snippets of an account from former truck driver Joe Ferguson, made just before he died.
Dan said: "Joe begins talking about how he was a trucker and went all over the place to collect waste, but also to help rip out old houses and carry it all off.
"He begins to talk about lorries all going to one place, Mubuoy. The trucks would arrive all through the night from all over Northern Ireland for years and years until in total over one million tonnes of waste was secretly and illegally dumped."
The pair also speak to environmental activist Dean Blackwood, who provided them with the tape of Joe and takes them along the River Faughan towards the site of the dump.
Dean said: "We are ultimately heartbroken because we’ve not been in a position to do anything about it despite the fact we have been raising awareness for a long time and felt we were being ignored."
Dean described his fears around the dump site, which at its closes sits only 5 metres away from the River Faughan, as "you just do not know what might happen".
In episode two, Dan and Lucy venture inside the site of Mobuoy dump.
Both spoke on BBC Radio Foyle prior to the release of the first episode of 'Buried' this afternoon.
Speaking to Mark Patterson, Lucy said: "We were looking into the issue more generally and somebody told us we had to look at it. When we did we were absolutely staggered.
"This is one of the biggest environmental crimes to ever happen in the UK. One of the things that has been really shocking to us was that it was treated as a local story. To us we feel this has national significance because of the scale of it and the urgency of the problem.
"The thing that was really game changing for us was when someone sent us the tape of Joe Ferguson who sadly died in 2016, he was a trucker who delivered waste to that site and realised that there was something there that should not be there.
“We heard this tape that he recorded just before he died because he felt so passionately about getting this to a wider audience, and no one had really heard that.
"When we got to the area, it is absolutely beautiful, it is a special area of conservation so the fact that this has happened in that area made the story even more powerful and shocking."
Buried is available to listen to on BBC Sounds.
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