Study on disamenity costs of landfill
This study - to identify and estimate the disamenity costs of landfill in Great Britain - was produced by Cambridge Econometrics in association with EFTEC and WRc. Disamenity costs are the local nuisance impacts caused by landfill activity and experienced by households living close to landfill. The local nuisance impacts include odour, dust, litter, noise , vermin and visual intrusion.
Landfill data used was made available by the Environment Agency and Scottish Environmental Protection Agency together with individual house price and ward-based socio-economic data drown from Cambridge Econometrics' AHPD database. Data for Northern Ireland is not yet available on a comparable basis.
It was found that those properties sited within half a mile of a landfill site suffer statistically significant disadvantages. The value of houses situated less than a quarter of a mile away from a landfill site were an average of £5,500 lower then the value of a similar house not situated near a landfill site. For those houses over a quarter of mile from a site but under half a mile, this value was an average of £1,600.
These were considerable regional differences in the impact of landfill disamenity, with Scotland showing the strongest and most robust effect on house prices of proximity to landfill.
Transferring this regional figures into a national context it was found that the estimated total mean reduction in house prices within half a mile of a landfill site amounts to £2.483million. The average reduction in houses prices near each landfill site equated to an average of £1.52 to £2.18 per tonne of landfill waste (at 1995 prices uprating by consumer inflation to 2002 prices).
Report
A copy of the report is available for downloading (PDF) (4MB)
See also this News Release and news story.
Landfill Directive Implementation Group brings together waste management and producer industry stakeholders representatives and regulatory and policy officials for advice and input on various issues related to implementation of the EU Landfill Directive.
Page last modified:
1 April 2005
Page published: 5 February 2003