Landfill Check

About Landfill Check

Landfill Check answers one question: is a property near a historic (closed) landfill site, and what went into it? It exists because the answer is public data, yet most people first encounter it inside a paid environmental search report, late in a house purchase.

The data

Everything here comes from the Environment Agency's Historic Landfill Sites dataset — 19,851 site boundaries with attributes covering operator, licence holder, licence dates, first/last waste input and waste types. We use the October 2025 revision and re-import when the EA publishes updates (typically a few times a year). Postcode locations come from Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open; town assignments from OS Open Names.

Methodology

  • Postcode results list every site whose boundary is within 1km of the postcode centre — measured edge-to-point, not centre-to-centre, so a postcode beside a large tip reads as 0m.
  • Directions are compass bearings from the postcode to the site's representative point.
  • Sites are assigned to their nearest town or city (within 15km) for area pages; ~1,050 English towns qualify.
  • Boundaries are displayed simplified for map performance; areas in hectares are computed from the full-resolution geometry.

Limitations — read these

  • Licensed-era records only. Systematic waste licensing began with the Control of Pollution Act 1974. Older tips — especially small pre-war ones — are incompletely recorded. Absence from this site is not evidence that no landfill ever existed at a location.
  • Not the contaminated-land register. That is a separate, council-held register created under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. A historic landfill record is not a contamination determination.
  • Attributes are as-published.Many sites have unrecorded dates or waste types. We show "not recorded" rather than guessing.
  • Boundaries are indicative, digitised at 1:10,000; some are buffers around a point rather than surveyed edges (flagged on the site page).
  • Not a substitute for a formal environmental search. If you're transacting, your conveyancer's search covers this dataset plus the contaminated-land register, current permitted sites, groundwater and flood context.

Errors

Spotted something wrong? Every data page has a "report an error" link. We review every report and log corrections.

Licensing

Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency and/or database right. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Our derived data is available for reuse — API & data access.