“Wilmington police were called to the Cherry Island landfill 31 Dec 2010. There among the loads of trash, workers found the body of a man. It appears he had been dumped with a load of medical waste.

The fire department’s hazmat team was called in to help with the investigation. Police are calling it a suspicious death, not ready to say if foul play was involved.

The short video accompanying the news report at Action News shows an aerial view of a rather untidy site with lots of scattered wastes, but nothing that appears to me medical waste identified by the typical red bags cased in white/grey and red cardboard outer boxes. However, the presence of a Hazmat tean suggests that this site was indeed receiving untreated medical wastes….as well as bodies!

Delaware Online reports that a spotter at the Cherry Island Landfill whose job is to make sure prohibited items do not get dumped at the Wilmington facility made the gruesome discovery, witnessing a dead body falling from a Waste Management dump truck into a trash pile.

Leaving aside the possibility of a murder with disposal of the corpse via the medical waste stream it seems that in Delaware, as in many other US states it is perfectly normal to landfill untreated wastes in hazardous waste landfill. That is environmentally unsound.