Hundreds of illegal waste dumps are operating across England — including 11 ‘super-sites’

A BBC investigation has uncovered hundreds of waste dumps operating illegally across England. Worse still, there are also 11 tips that have been branded ‘super-sites’ — each of which contains rubbish measured in tens of thousands of tonnes.

Environment Agency data indicated that there were over 500 clandestine dumps in the country by the end of 2025. That’s in spite of the authority shutting down more than 700 similar sites over the course of 2024-25.

Where are these waste dumps located?

Usually, the illegal tips are hidden out in the countryside, on what would otherwise be farmland. Headlines on the dumps peaked public concern last year after 20,000 tonnes of waste was dumped in a field in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. The site, just off the A34, had apparently been used for this purpose for several months.

Following up on the story, the BBC made an Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) data request to establish the scale of the problem. It found that there were a minimum of 11 sites that topped that 20,000-tonne figure. The BBC reported that:

six of the biggest sites are at Northwich, Cheshire (280,000 tonnes); Camborne, Cornwall (50,000 tonnes); Burnley, Lancashire (25,000 and 50,000 tonnes); Sittingbourne, Kent (36,000 tonnes); Fakenham, Norfolk (originally 35,000 tonnes). Dumping has been stopped at four of the sites, but none of them have yet been cleared up.

Worse still, there are likely more sites of similar magnitude. The Environment Agency admitted that:

this figure is based on the data we hold; however, we don’t have this information for every site.

Over the 2024/25 period, the Environment Agency stated that it closed down 743 illegal dumps. Of these, some 143 were classified as ‘high risk’. However, the watchdog also admitted that it knows of 517 tips that are still active.

However, environmental campaign group River Action highlighted that the Environment Agency only published this dated under pressure from the BBC. Spokesperson Erica Popplewell asked:

Why is the Environment Agency not saying what’s happening more publicly so that we can see what actions they’re taking and the secrecy around dumping sites can be eroded?

Links to organised crime

The Agency has previously claimed that it didn’t disclose the information in order to avoid prejudicing active investigations. This is because police claim that organised crime gangs run many of the illegal dumps.

Landfill tax alone is over £126 a tonne, on top of which businesses have to pay fees to the individual legal landfill sites. As such, the gangs make their money by massively undercutting the prices charged by legitimate operators to dispose of refuse. As the BBC explained:

The gangs often bring shredding equipment onto rural sites, located off otherwise quiet country lanes, which then see an influx of lorries bringing in waste – from household rubbish to soil and aggregate from construction sites – to be broken down into smaller, dumpable amounts.

Lorry loads are then taken away, either to be dumped in increasingly larger mountains of waste, buried under farmland or bridleways or even stored in barns.

The sheer prevalence of this pattern of organised crime led former Environment Agency head James Bevan to call it the “new narcotics”.

In fact, earlier this same month police seized six guns, “suspected fake electrical goods”, a “suspected stolen vehicle” and £100,000 cash in a series of raids linked to waste crimes across Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire.