Calvert Landfilll Site | landfill site / rubbish/garbage dump

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Rubbish comes from nationwide by rail to be buried here.

The landfill site at Calvert is owned by Shanks and McEwan. It was originally owned by the London Brick Company. After they had finished digging up the Lower Oxford clay which they used for making bricks, they didn't know what to do with the pits they had dug until Shanks and McEwan came along and offered to buy the land and turn it into a landfill site.

Before the site could be used Shanks and McEwan had to make a few changes: the sides had to be made to slope inwards so that the rubbish, when the hole is full, will move down and stop when it hits the boundaries. They also had to take out the clay that the brick company couldn't use and put it back in and compress it down to line the pit and make it waterproof.

Now it is used for our household rubbish which is collected from our wheely-bins and brought by dustcart to Calvert tip. The site also collects rubbish from West London, Bristol and more recently Brentford. The rubbish collected from here gets to the tip by train, the train from Bristol has 52 containers, the one from west London has 71 and the one from Brentford has 63, each container contains 14 tons of compressed rubbish!!!

When the rubbish arrives it is driven to the pit and squashed by a big machine called a compacter, this alone weighs 33.5 tons, just think how much all the machinery used there put together would weigh!!! The compactor has steel wheels with spikes to rip open the bags.

[Picture] This view is of the northern corner of the currently active part of the landfill site taken from a footpath that threads its way through the site to Edgcott in the south-west from a bridleway that comes from Calvert. Calvert is one of the largest landfill sites in the country (landfill permission is currently 106 hectares), and takes rubbish from London, and from Bath and Bristol. The waste is tipped from container trucks which are bought to the site by rail. Waste transfer station, Calvert Landfill Site, Calvert, moved into place by bulldozers, and compressed by heavy compactors which have steel wheels with spikes to break up the waste and rip open plastic bags.

The landfill goes into old clay pits left over from when clay was extracted for the Calvert Brickworks which opened in 1900, see SP6923 : Clay Pits near Calvert. On the 1940s OS map this particular area was Charndon Wood, but as successive pits were opened up, so the woods were dug up for clay as well. When the brickworks ceased production in 1991, eight huge pits remained.

The use of the pits south of the Charndon-Calvert road for landfill was authorised in 1977, and about two-thirds of the pits in the north and west of the site are now full. These pits have been capped with clay, and wells drilled to extract gas with a high methane content, as well as contaminated water. Two power stations on the site generate electricity from the gas enough to power 17,000 homes. The site is currently operated by the Waste Recycling Group for the Department of the Environment.