The Enduring 20-Year Nightmare of Hafod Landfill
Lead Petition - Hafod Landfill Campaign
For over 20 years, the communities surrounding Hafod Landfill in Wrexham have endured the sickening smell of hydrogen sulphide (H2S), the infamous "rotten egg" stench that marks the release of fugitive emissions. What began as an environmental issue has spiralled into a prolonged nuisance and annoyance crisis and a profound failure of governance, culminating in a dramatic campaign to revoke the site's permit.
The ordeal is defined by a simple, brutal truth: the emissions constitute an unacceptable statutory nuisance, robbing residents of the basic right to enjoy their own homes and gardens.
"The smell is a siege. We spend summers with windows bolted shut, the air inside our houses thick with dread. It disrupts sleep, ruins meals, and instils a constant psychological burden. Nausea, burning throats, and stinging eyes are daily realities, clear physical indicators of the air quality we are forced to endure."
The Permit Threat: Health for Generations
While the immediate impact is a full-blown nuisance and annoyance crisis, the long-term threat to generational health hangs heavy over the communities. There are reports the landfill permit is valid for a further 35 years, which is a massive concern to residents and future residents buying property in the area. Residents fear not only the continued short-term symptoms but the unknown consequences of chronic low-level exposure stretching over four decades. This open-ended environmental threat is what makes the demand for permit revocation so urgent.
The Official Insult: Trivialising Annoyance Thresholds
The distress felt by residents became official data in 2025, but the response from regulatory bodies has been marked by a staggering lack of empathy.
The lowest point came during the Wrexham Council’s Homes and Environmental Scrutiny Committee meeting in April 2025. Facing residents pleading for relief, a Public Health Wales (PHW) representative at the meeting suggested that those affected should "vacate the area for respite" as a solution.
This callous statement was immediately condemned by campaigners as an insult, effectively framing the problem as a burden on the victims rather than a failure of the polluter and the regulator. The campaigners view this as demonstrating a profound gap between the regulatory approach, and what the local Public Protection Office calls their "soft power" approach, and the urgent needs of a distressed community.
This trivialisation continued in the critique of monitoring data. Official bodies often focused on Chronic Health Monitoring under WHO thresholds, of averaging data over longer periods and assessing long-term risk as "low", but this approach systematically downplayed the most critical metric: Annoyance and Nuisance.
The key is the WHO’s nuisance threshold for Hydrogen Sulphide: 5 ppb (parts per billion). The fact that recent ‘amended’ or ‘re-scaling’ of existing results of monitoring still showed a considerable 23% exceedance of the 5ppb nuisance threshold is not a trivial metric; it is the undeniable proof that the emissions constitute an unacceptable statutory nuisance and validates every complaint made by the community.
The Data Debacle: Compliance by "Scaling"
The campaign reached a political crescendo with a Senedd petition, signed by nearly 1,200 people, demanding the revocation of the Hafod Landfill permit. In September 2025, the community finally presented damning monitoring evidence to the Senedd Petitions Committee.
The collected data for March to August 2025 was conclusive in demonstrating non-compliance:
* 63% of the monitoring period exceeded the 1 ppb odour above human detection levels and threshold.
* 34% of the monitoring period exceeded the 5 ppb above the statutory nuisance and annoyance threshold.
Crucially, this data was not merely an assertion by campaigners. The company commissioned by the operator and the local council, to complete the report from the collected monitoring data between March 2025 and August 2025, confirmed the results as "mathematically correct". This verification meant the evidence presented to the Senedd was undisputed proof of the statutory nuisance.
This evidence should have led to immediate, drastic regulatory action. But then, on December 2, 2025, Wrexham.com reported a stunning development, along with a declaration that further drilling of new gas well, will risk ‘higher-than-usual’ H2S odour, but also the previous results H2S emission monitoring data had been amended by a method called "scaling".
The result? The data, which had been mathematically verified to show significant non-compliance, was now reported to be compliant with required thresholds. This opaque process, announced without public substantiation, publication of the methodology, or verification, has obliterated public trust. Campaigners are publicly questioning whether the effect of this process was to narrow the narrative and frame the evidence, resulting in a convenient regulatory shield for the operator just as political pressure reached its peak.
Silence and Scapegoating
The regulatory response to the call for transparency has compounded the sense of betrayal. As the lead campaigners, acting on behalf of the thousands of affected residents, have repeatedly sought clarification, transparency, and public engagement regarding the site's operation, and the controversial data amendment, they were met with administrative hostility.
In formal written correspondence a Wrexham Council Public Protection representative, rather than engaging with the legitimate concerns of a deeply affected community, chose instead to accuse the lead campaigner’s many requests for information and pleas for accountability on behalf of those affected, as "vexatious" and threatened to "block" further attempts to contact the council.
This is the ultimate insult: a community representative in pleading for public health and environmental justice is deemed an annoyance, while the operators causing the environmental havoc are given cover through opaque data "scaling".
The Demand: Revocation Now
The Hafod Landfill campaign is not about trivial inconvenience; it is a fight for the basic right to live free from statutory nuisance and the fear of long-term health consequences stretching to possibly 2062. The community's demand remains singular: the revocation of the permit.
The residents of Wrexham look at the 20 years of suffering, the clear, mathematically verified unamended data, and the sudden, adjusted compliance achieved through "scaling" and they see only one inescapable conclusion: regulatory failure.
Crucially, the problem is being exacerbated by climate change, with increased rainfall and intensity of rainfall compromising the landfill's integrity. This renders the permit fundamentally unfit for purpose with current and future climate change, as the increased ingress of water drives the chemical reactions that produce the noxious Hydrogen Sulphide emissions.
The closure of Hafod Landfill is the only outcome that can restore faith in the system and allow the residents of Wrexham to finally, truly, breathe clean air. The Senedd Inquiry is currently considering all the evidence before making a decision on revocation in mid-January. The residents of Johnstown and the surrounding areas wait with "bated breath" hoping and praying that the Senedd can finally bring an end to the long suffering and regulatory betrayal.
THE FIGHT WILL CONTINUE!
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