Watershed Investigations and Investigate Europe have created what experts say is the most comprehensive map and landfill risk assessment analysis of the region produced publicly to date. It reveals the statistics and hidden threats these waste sites pose to water, ecosystems, and communities continent-wide.
The map will live in perpetuity on our dedicated mapping page, making the data freely available to all.
Journalismfund.eu provided funding support for the investigation.
Methodology
In late 2024 Watershed Investigations and Investigate Europe submitted FOIs and press requests to 10 European countries, the European Commission and Eurostat. However, information was always not available or complete. It transpired that there’s no centrally held data for landfills by EU bodies. Some countries, such as Germany, do not hold landfill data centrally; it’s held by individual states. But not all states make their landfill location data available to the public, or do not appear to have this data. The quality of the data we collected is also mixed. In the UK the agencies in England, Wales and Scotland have very good, publicly accessible data on landfills, including information on which landfills were operating pre-pollution control legislation – these are classified as historic landfills – and which are sanitary, open or closed. But this granular level of publicly available information is lacking in many other EU countries. We put in a second round of requests to press officers and other landfill bodies and collected some more data from government websites, but still there were some rejections and a lack of responses. For example, much German historic landfill data is not shared publicly, although if you are buying a house it’s possible in some states to search the register for historic landfills in your area.
We then drew on open source data to collect more landfill data, namely the EU Pollutant Release and Transfer Register, filtering for waste sites and landfills, plus the Waste Methane Assessment Platform, again filtered for landfills. This gave us a better spread of landfill data across the continent. However, due to the level and quality of country specific landfill data it appears that there are many more landfills in some countries than others, which is not an accurate picture of the number of landfills, rather where landfill data is available.
We mapped what data we gathered on QGis and overlaid it with shapefiles of flood zones, conservation areas (Natura and Emerald), erosion zones, drinking water zones and groundwater with failing chemical status. We sourced these largely from the EU datahub and in some cases supplemented these with national agency data, for example in the UK. Using geospatial analysis we calculated the numbers of landfills in these zones.
Erosion data
Where no polygon erosion data was available (everywhere apart from the UK), we calculated how many landfills were 200 metres from the coast. For the UK we used the latest NCERM data, with no further investment into defences and a medium term erosion risk, (NCERM-NFI-2055-70CC).
Flood data
We used coastal and river fluvial flood map data and we utilised the medium risk flood parameters, a 1 in 100 year flood. This means there is a 1% chance of a flood event of that magnitude occurring in any given year, which means there’s a medium to high probability of flooding. Fluvial means from floods from rivers bursting their banks and other inland waters, not from rain – which is pluvial flooding.
Another data hurdle is that not all countries make drinking water zones publicly available. We were able to access it from the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. The WISE Water Framework Directive (WFD) protected areas were a source of several countries’ drinking water data, but we assume that the data for Poland, Bulgaria and Ireland is not correct, as it covers the entire country.
We used EU designated Natura 2000 Emerald Network data for conservation EU data for groundwater with poor chemical status.
The next hurdle was that the data was not uniform, so we couldn’t merge them into a single landfill dataset. It was also challenging to clean the data. For example, the flood polygons downloaded from the EU website were overlapping and therefore we could not run the analysis, until we ironed out the data. Also adjacent landfills can have similar names, so using the delete duplicate function was too clumsy to use in spreadsheet format. I used QGis to identify duplicates by location, but some of the data is only point source data – not always polygons of the exact landfill – so there is a risk of some duplicates. To complicate matters further, landfills can be built one on top of the other.
The larger issue is that we don’t have enough of the data, not that we are over estimating the picture. There are estimated to be 350,000-500,000 landfills across Europe and the UK. We’ve got location data for 61,338 landfills across Europe and the UK, about 12% of what’s out there.
We tried to gather as much data as we could on illegal landfills, but this is of course the most difficult task. In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy should map their illegal landfills in the ‘Triangle of Death’ in Campania, Southern Italy. But there’s been decades of government inaction, despite health studies showing higher cancer rates. So these illegal landfills are not on the map. Another issue with mapping illegal landfills using satellite data, is that it could scupper planned action by the authorities.
To verify my methodology I consulted Dr Alex Riley, a lecturer in environmental science at the University of Hull. He is advising Defra, the UK government’s Department for Environment and Rural Affairs, on landfills at risk in the UK, using mapping and geospatial analysis in his work. He advised on all the data challenges we had and he was satisfied with our methodology. I also consulted Prof Kate Spencer, Environmental Geochemistry at Queen Mary, University of London. She’s a leading landfills expert and is also working with Defra to identify the most at risk landfills in England. In France we consulted experts at ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, involved in landfills and the BRGM, France’s public reference institution in Earth Science applications. Our reporters have been consulting and interviewing experts in their home countries for their own stories.
The end result is that there’s better coverage in some western European countries than others. But according to academic experts this is more than has been done previously and it will be a useful and informative resource. It will also raise awareness of the problem, which is somewhat out of sight out of mind and not high on many/any government agendas.
Leana.Hosea@watershedinvestigations.com
