Research from Friends of the Earth Cymru has found that at least 45,000 sites across Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste but have never been adequately inspected, leaving communities and wildlife vulnerable to a potential environmental crisis.
Despite Wales’s extensive industrial history, Tuesday’s publication found that due to a lack of funding and oversight, only 82 sites across the country have ever been fully examined and classified as contaminated, meaning the actual scale of the threat is unknown.
Former industrial areas, landfills and quarries can contain contaminants such as heavy metals, oil, tar, solvents, gases and radioactive substances.
The environmental campaigners submitted freedom of information requests to all 22 Welsh councils and reviewed publicly available data. Only 11 councils provided full responses, yet they revealed 45,157 potentially contaminated sites, suggesting the true figure could be far higher.
While most of Wales’s industrial waste legacy has never been investigated, in some places its impact is clear to see.
In Ynysddu, a village in the Sirhowy valley in south Wales, waste from companies was dumped in the former Ty Llwyd quarry on the mountain above the village in the 1960s and 70s.
Residents have warned for years that after heavy rainfall, foul-smelling brown and foamy liquid seeps from the quarry and downhill into the surrounding woods, council-owned land that was used by children and dogwalkers until it was recently fenced off.
In 2023, testing by Dr David Megson, an environmental chemist from Manchester Metropolitan University, found unsafe levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Ynysddu. PCBs are forever chemicals that accumulate in the food chain and can cause liver damage and increased cancer risk in humans.
All testing commissioned by Caerphilly county borough council to date has indicated zero level of PCBs, and the site is not legally defined as contaminated land.
Megson has suggested that the council may be using tests that are not sensitive enough, or testing in the wrong places. Caerphilly council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jane Beechy, 64, bought a plot of land at the bottom of the mountain in 2013, which she intended to use for stables. She had the land tested before she purchased it, and the results said it contained slightly elevated levels of chloroform – safe for horses, but not young children.
However, over the past decade, more frequent and prolonged periods of wet weather have led groundwater levels in the quarry to rise and sometimes flood the woodland and land downhill. Since 2018, water from the quarry has begun pooling on Beechy’s land, and she says that nothing will grow there any more.
“It ruined my business plans. Who is going to keep their horses here if they don’t think it’s safe?” she said.
At the Ynysddu allotments, soil samples tested positive for PCBs after Storm Dennis in 2020, when water rushed down the mountain from the quarry and the river flowing through the valley broke its banks, flooding parts of the village.
“I am still growing tomatoes here, but I worry about it. Some people in the village grow things they want to eat in tubs,” said Mark Jones, 67.
Despite a legal requirement to do so every five years, many councils, including Caerphilly, have not updated their inspection strategies for potentially contaminated land on average since 2014, Friends of the Earth Cymru found. Of Wales’s 22 local authorities, only six publish a legally mandated contaminated land register online, leaving communities in the dark about what may be lying under their feet.
On Tuesday, Friends of the Earth Cymru called for a public inquiry into the scale and impact of contaminated land in Wales and for the UK and Welsh governments to provide councils with the resources to identify and clean up potentially dangerous sites.
Its spokesperson Kirsty Luff said: “It’s shocking that so much land could be contaminated and yet isn’t being properly inspected. People in Wales deserve to know whether the places where they live, work, and play are free from pollution.
“This issue must not be ignored. The longer the delay, the greater the risk to our health, our environment and future generations.”
The Welsh government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The picture could be similar across the rest of the UK. A BBC investigation suggests that of 13,093 potentially toxic sites identified as high-risk in the early 2000s, only 1,465 have been inspected.
