ABSTRACT
Unwelcome development in the countryside is not just confined to minerals. Another sector that awakens a great deal of controversy is waste dumping. While the extraction of minerals is generally regarded as being the kind of “dirty” and “noisy” activity that many people now living in the countryside find wholly undesirable, the view of landfill or waste dumping is probably even more negative. Minerals at least have the virtue of being “useful”; landfill deals with the discarded and the “useless”. Moreover, this “useless” material is often toxic and dirty. A landfill site is definitely not the sort of thing that most people want “in their backyard”. In our social survey only 4.2% of the total sample wanted to see more waste dumping in the countryside while 62.1% wanted less (for the villagers the figures were 4.7% and 65.4% respectively). The nub of the problem is, therefore, where are landfill sites to be situated?
