Canada’s oil companies want permission to treat and release toxic waste from Alberta’s tar sands into the Athabasca River — the same river that flows into the drinking water supplies of First Nations communities. But many First Nations leaders say they’re already carrying an unbearable burden from the world’s fourth‑largest oil reserve, with health impacts that continue to mount.
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
A first-of-its-kind analysis of the UK and Europe’s landfills has revealed that tens of thousands are located in flood-prone zones, areas used for drinking water, or in sensitive conservation sites. Watershed Investigations and Investigate Europe found that many of the 60,000 sites mapped are at risk of leaking toxic waste, posing threats to fragile ecosystems.
Check out where your nearest landfill site is on our map: https://watershedinvestigations.com/find-out-whats-polluting-your-local-rivers-lakes-and-coast/
Journalismfund.eu provided funding support for the investigation.
Britain is facing mounting pressure to ban mercury dental fillings, one of the few countries yet to prevent the practice, as new data reveals alarming contamination levels in the nation’s fish and shellfish.
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that can harm the nervous, digestive and immune systems, as well as the lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes, even at low levels of exposure. Its organic form, methylmercury, is particularly dangerous to unborn babies and can move through the food chain building up in insects, fish and birds.
Four years after a stricken cargo ship caused the largest plastic spill ever recorded, volunteers on Sri Lanka’s beaches are still sifting kilograms of tiny, toxic plastic pellets from the sand.
Scientists are now flagging fears the damage to the environment could be much more enduring than previously thought.
So far, hundreds of millions of nurdles may have been cleared away – but the remaining, lentil-sized microplastic granules have become increasingly difficult to find as they disappear deeper into the sand.
Worse, those pieces of plastic now appear to be becoming even more toxic, new research suggests.
To read the full article and watch the TV report, click the links below.
To listen to the podcast, click the link below, or search for Sri Lanka the X Press Pearl Disaster on your podcast app.
Thousands of old landfill sites, contaminated land, effluent discharge points, sewage dumping sites, chemicals plants, refineries, protected land and water, river water quality, bathing water quality, forever chemical pollution, protected land and seas… these are just some of the more than 120 environmental datasets that are available for anyone to see and use on the Watershed Pollution Map.
It makes visible the challenges to our rivers, seas, wildlife and habitats. None of which would have been possible without the incredible technical capabilities of Felt, the cutting edge could-native GIS mapping platform, which enabled us to tackle datasets of all formats and sizes and visualise them simply and elegantly. We looked at other open source solutions like QGIS, but knew we needed something we could load different data formats in easily and embed across different news sources quickly and Felt fit the bill perfectly.
Invaluable too, are the wonderful team at Felt who have supported Watershed’s goals and understood the needs of an investigative journalism non-profit that wants to democratise environmental information and make it free to all to access wherever possible.
The map continues to be an enormous hit, which proves there is a need and an appetite for this kind of information. It is used by universities, academics, students, researchers, regulators, communities, campaign groups, NGOs, businesses and journalists, and received more than 700,000 views in its first few weeks.
As a result, Watershed published or was the source for the following stories, which either arose from analysing data from the map or while collating data that could then be visualised on the map:
We held workshops and a public event on the map at Cambridge University’s Data School, which was attended by professors, undergrads, postgrads, researchers, A-level students, NGOs and interested local people. We also presented to the Public Interest News Foundation’s network of local journalists and briefed organisations such as The Local Story Exchange and environmental NGOs on the map’s capabilities.
It has been widely welcomed by people across a range of disciplines:
“This is a really great resource. Congratulations. It will also be a great teaching resource… and it is certainly doing the rounds as I’ve lost count of the number of messages I’ve got from people about it,” Liverpool John Moores University.
“Fantastic resource. Much needed,” Stockholm University.
“I’ve just been playing with the maps. They are great and already found some useful datasets. I can imagine we might also be able to set some useful exercises with the students. Well done!”
Portsmouth University.
“This is incredible! What a fantastic resource! We will definitely be using this.” Marine Conservation Society.
“Thank you so much for sharing the map with us. It is such a valuable tool and I just want to say a huge thank you for all the work you have done to pull this together. Having this data is so valuable for our campaigning.” CHEMTrust.
“It’s an amazing piece of work and a great public service… It’s going to be such an asset to so many people,” Guardian.
“I’ve shared with colleagues in Scot, NE, Yorks, West Mids, East Ang, Cornwall. It blew their minds, how much data there is. They are all studying it and are going to use it.” Local Story Exchange.
“I will definitely use it with journalism students”, City University
We continue to add datasets and use the map to underpin and support our work going forward. We hope it is as much value to you as it is to us.
Dolphins, otters, porpoises, fish and birds across the UK have been found to have toxic “forever chemicals” in their tissue and organs, analysis of official data has revealed. Watershed Investigations, the Marine Conservation Society and the Guardian obtained official data on more than 1,000 animals to reveal widespread contamination by a range of PFAS, particularly PFOS and PFOA, which have been studied the longest and found to be toxic, and are now banned. However, there are more than 10,000 types of PFAS and little is known about the toxic effects of most of them.
Watershed has mapped more than 1,000 animals found to be contaminated with PFAS.
