‘It’s a poison and it’s killing us’: the hidden dangers of old UK landfills

Rebecca Currie and her son Mathew, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They have spent years living next to a landfill near Newcastle-under-Lyme. Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/PA

Old landfills are often described as ticking timebombs, but some have already detonated.

In the 1960s, a landfill at Brofiscin quarry in Groesfaen, south Wales – one of a group of old landfills known to contain cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) – ruptured, causing a farmer’s cattle to fall ill and calves to be born with serious deformities.