Past industry and waste disposal activities can pollute or contaminate land – this can be hazardous to health and the environment.
To create a clean and safe environment, we have a 'statutory duty' to implement and enforce contaminated land legislation - Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act,1990, which came into force in April 2000, establishes the legal framework for dealing with contaminated land.
We will:
- identify land where contamination is causing an unacceptable risk to health or the environment
- ensure that contaminated land is cleaned up and made safe
- ensure that building and development sites are investigated and cleaned up by developers, so they are safe and suitable for their new use
Contaminated land strategy
We must outline our approach to identifying and remediating contaminated land in a written strategy. Our first contaminated land strategy was published in July 2001, with subsequent updates in 2005, 2010 and 2016.
Our current contaminated land strategy outlines:
- how we'll inspect our area for contamination
- how we'll deal with any land that is found to be contaminated
- progress made to date
We've identified 3,690 potentially contaminated sites in York, all of which either have a past industrial use or were used for waste disposal activities.
Contaminated land register
None of the sites inspected to date have been found to match the legal definition of contaminated land, under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, so there are currently no entries on our contaminated land register.