Mucking Marshes Landfill

Mucking Marshes Landfill is a major landfill site servicing London. Covering hundreds of acres of former gravel quarry, it is one of the largest landfills in Western Europe and has been filled for decades with municipal and commercial waste floated thirty miles down the River Thames in barges to Mucking Wharf. The barges, each carrying dozens of distinctive yellow containers, are a familiar, though rarely commented-upon, sight along the Thames through Central London. Once the barges have travelled 30 miles downstream from Tower Bridge, mechanical cranes at Mucking Wharf unload the distinctive yellow containers onto trucks. The trucks make their way up the artificial mound created by decades of garbage compaction that towers over the surrounding flat landscape. Flocks of seagulls and other scavenging estuarine birds are a familiar sight as the trucks disgorge their contents.

The landfill site itself, although it dominates the village of Mucking, is strictly guarded and is surrounded by a perimeter fence more than four miles long. Cory Environmental, the operators of the site, have gated off Mucking Wharf Road, meaning that spectacular views of the Thames meeting the North Sea can now be accessed from Mucking only via a circuitous footpath through the neighbouring village of East Tilbury.

In recent years, changes in London governance, including the creation of the Greater London Authority under Ken Livingstone have led to indications of a future reassessment of London's waste strategy based more on recycling and less on landfill sites like Mucking Marshes. However, as of November 2007, Mucking continues to be the destination for a large proportion of London's waste, although the effect of tough new European Union directives may change this in the future.

Mucking Marshes Landfill was granted an extension to receive London's waste until 2010.

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