Dumped: Could You Survive on a Landfill?

By Simon Usborne, Independent UK. Posted September 3, 2007.

It would be tough, they were told -- an "eco challenge" in a secret location. They would need to pack their passports and update their jabs. Sasha Gardner, a Bournemouth-based glamour model, was expecting to visit a rainforest or pacific island. "But when we turned up, we weren't at an airport," she says, "we were in a rubbish dump in Croydon."

Gardner and 10 other contestants are set to be the latest stars of reality TV, but Dumped, a new series to be screened on Channel 4 early next month, is no Shipwrecked, with its bronzed twentysomethings "surviving" for months in paradise, and there will be none of the designer sofas of the Big Brother house. Their challenge will be to live, eat and sleep for three weeks on a south London landfill, completing a series of tasks designed to highlight the true scale of what we throw away.

Rob Holdway, director of Brighton-based environmental consultancy Giraffe Innovation, who presents Dumped and set the challenges, says it was telling that most participants in the show, which was filmed last June, had packed for a long-haul flight. "A lot of people think they have to go to the Arctic or the Amazon to highlight climate change," he says. "But the reality is our desire for all the stuff we use is increasing carbon emissions. The ecology starts in our kitchens and rubbish bins."

On the face of it, the "dumpees," who also included a marine engineer, a champion snowboarder and a tattooist, did not seem like the kind of people who would feel at home surrounded by human detritus, but then who would? "I honestly thought I was going to leave," says Gardner. "I'd never even been camping before and I thought there was no way I could live on a dump for three weeks. It was awful."

It should be noted that dump in question was not all it seemed. Health and safety laws prevented participants living among the used nappies and syringes that litter real landfills. Instead, producers worked with the Environment Agency and the Croydon dump's operators to collect 1,000 tons of real people's rubbish, screened for hazardous waste, piling it up within sniffing distance of the real landfill.

Their aim was to replicate the rubbish that makes its way to the landfill sites that dot the outskirts of our towns and cities. Every year we generate 434 million tons of rubbish in the UK. Of all that waste, just 27 per cent is recycled, with most of the remainder ending up buried underground. "We like to say we throw things away, but there's no such place as 'away,'" says Holdway.

The Dumped producers selected a mixed bunch of environmentalists, energy guzzlers and the indifferent. For most, the sight of tons of other people's rubbish was a shocking one. "It was awful to see the things people throw away unnecessarily," says Gardner. "There were Coke cans and other things you can recycle, but also things of value like television sets."

Gardner admits to being one of the show's worst offenders. "I'd never done any recycling whatsoever," she says, "and when they asked me what my carbon footprint was, I didn't know what that meant." Whatever that footprint is, it is likely to be high -- Gardner goes on up to 20 flights a year for modelling trips and holidays.

Rob Holdway agrees and calls it "bizarre" that the UK has no real culture of recycling, especially when you compare our record, which is the third worst in Europe, to that of countries such as Austria and the Netherlands, where up to 65 per cent of waste is recycled. In some parts of the UK, that figure is as low as 6 per cent. "It's convenient for us not to deal with these things," says Holdway. "But it's got to change."

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