Defusing the waste timebomb

The Human race is burying itself under a mountain of its own rubbish.

The UK alone produces some 400 million tonnes of waste a year, a large proportion of which goes into traditional "landfill" - literally dumped into large holes in the land. But like many countries the UK is running out of disposal space and the damage to the environment from landfill sites is of increasing concern.

Now experts at Cardiff University's Centre of Excellence in Waste Research, an initiative backed by the Welsh Assembly Government, are drawing on world-leading expertise from a range of disciplines in a race against time to find solutions which will enable humanity to avoid an environmental disaster.

Among these solutions Engineers are using the latest technology to update a time-honoured practice. They are collecting data from large-scale experiments in composting, taking and analysing constant readings of temperature, gas flows, and gas composition - allowing them to achieve in 8 weeks a quality of compost that would take a year under traditional methods - ensuring that millions of tonnes of domestic waste becomes a valuable resource rather than a problem.