Swansea Friends of the Earth
Cyfeillion y Ddaear Abertawe
Cwmrhydyceirw Quarry is situated on the outskirts of Morrison a suburb of Swansea close to the M4 motorway. It is surrounded on the sides by housing with both a primary school and a comprehensive school very close by.
The quarry was formerly mined for sandstone and ceased working in 1979. Planning Permission was granted by the Swansea City Council in June 1981 for the tipping of inert materials and subsequent restoration of the quarry . In June 1984 Planning permission was refused by the City Council for the restoration of the quarry by the importation of “non-toxic solid wastes”. An appeal was lodged with the Welsh Office against this decision and was subsequently granted on 11th March 1985. Landfilling took place between 1985 and 1991.
The current waste at the quarry is underlain by a 2mm thick High Density Polyethylene ( HDPE) flexible membrane liner with a clay liner underneath and a further clay liner above the HDPE. This liner system has been shown to be leaking polluting the groundwater.
Between 1985 and 1991 approximately 90,000 cubic metres of waste including domestic, commercial and dry industrial waste, together with filter cake waste, sludges, liquid waste, waste oils and incinerator residues were deposited at the site.
Currently the quarry is owned by an Italian owned firm SI Green who have made an application for a licence to restart tipping waste in the quarry. The Environment Agency has recently announced (July 2008) that it plans to issue a licence to tip waste on the site The following resources are available on this website.
A general information sheet on the process.
A list of frequently asked questions
These sheets are produced by the Environment Agency but we have annotated them with extra information.
Also available are scanned copied of old documents showing what was tipped in the site in the 1980s.
First scanned page
Second scanned page
An earlier Environment Agency Memo is available for download by Clicking Here.