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The Shelburne Town Landfill, also known as the Shelburne Town Dump or the Morvan Road Landfill, is a waste disposal site located in the southwestern Nova Scotia town of Shelburne. It operated between 1949 and 1990, but remained a transfer station for waste items until its formal closure on December 3, 2016. The landfill is managed and subsidized by the Town of Shelburne. While in operation, it received and burned industrial, medical, and residential waste products from hospitals, households, naval bases, and industrial parks.

The Shelburne Town Landfill is situated near Shelburne's South End community, which is primarily comprised of Black and low-income residents. Many residents are concerned that the dump is contributing to high cancer rates and other health issues within the community. There were also concerns that contaminants from the landfill were leaching into South End's well water. Some have constituted the placement of the landfill an act of environmental racism. The South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED), along with the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health (ENRICH) Project, are working to eliminate the social and environmental issues facing Shelburne's South End community.

Water contamination claims
South End community members expressed concerns that contaminants from the landfill were leaching into the wells that they rely on for drinking water. In response to these worries, SEED approached Rural Water Watch, a Nova Scotian NGO that aims to create awareness regarding the necessity for regular water testing in rural areas. Rural Water Watch spent the fall of 2018 collecting water samples from 24 South End homes. The water was tested for the presence of contaminants, total metals, and total coliform bacteria and e. coli. The test results did not show that contaminants from the landfill had leached into the community's wells. However, several of the samples tested positive for e. coli and high coliform. Rural Water Watch continues to test wells in the region, with funding from the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC).

Water security in the South End is also impacted by the fact that wells tend to run dry during the summer months. South End residents do not have access to town water because geological conditions have made access to the water supply costly. In 2019, actor Elliot Page, who was born in Halifax, offered to contribute $25,000 to the construction of a drilled well that would ameliorate the community's water issues. Page offered to pay an additional $5,000 annually for the maintenance of the well. On February 10, 2020, the Shelburne Town Council accepted the offer. The well has not been constructed.

Human and social
The landfill is located in the South End of Shelburne where many Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities and people of lower socioeconomic status reside. The demographics of the South End dates back to the settlement of Black Loyalists following the Revolutionary War of 1776.

Residents have raised concerns regarding the community’s high rates of cancer, liver and kidney disorders, respiratory illnesses, and deaths that community members say can be traced back to the landfill’s contaminants. Founder of SEED and resident of Shelburne, Louise Delisle, points to the landfill’s implications on residents’ mental health due to grief and stress associated with losing loved ones, caring for sick family members, and facing stigma from outside of their community.

In July 2021, Canadian Professors Ingrid Waldron and Juliet Daniel announced that they will be launching a research project that looks into the connection between the Shelburne Town Landfill and high cancer rates within the community. The study will also investigate the potential contribution of various social determinants of health such as genetics, generational toxin exposure, income and employment, and lifestyle to the high cancer rates in the community.

Environmental
The burning of waste products at the landfill has contributed to concerns regarding air pollution in Shelburne. Although the tests carried out by Rural Water Watch showed that contaminants from the landfill had not leached into the South End community's drinking-water wells, residents believe that it could have happened at some point.

In June 2016, Nova Scotia Environment discovered an oil spill upon inspection of the Shelburne Town Landfill. Private sector engineers were required to follow up and the landfill closed a few months later. After the landfill stopped operating in 1990, provincially mandated remediation work and subsequent groundwater monitoring were supposed to have taken place. This work was not done, partly due to high costs. Shelburne mayor, Harold Locke, has stated that no plans are in place to do any remediation of the landfill site.

Activism and debate
The South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED), a nonprofit organization formed in 2016, has led a grassroots community response to the Shelburne landfill. SEED has collaborated with local and national levels of government with the goals of closing the landfill, developing a database documenting the landfill’s impact on the well-being of nearby communities, and providing residents reparations. SEED continues to be in operation today, organizing public events to bring awareness to what they describe as Shelburne’s ongoing issues of environmental racism.

The Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health (ENRICH) Project led by Dr. Ingrid Waldron, a professor at Dalhousie University, has collaborated with SEED as it works towards conducting community-based research on the effects of environmental degradation on Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities.

Residents have reported frustrations with the government’s lack of response. Rick Davis, a councillor of Shelburne, responded to citizens’ claims of environmental racism at multiple levels of government by accusing residents of “playing the racism card.”

Legislation
In 2018, Bill no. 28, a non-partisan Environmental Bill of Rights for Nova Scotia was proposed by the Nova Scotia Environmental Rights Working Group (NSERWG) to addresses the concerns of historically vulnerable residents of Nova Scotia but only progressed to its first reading.

In 2018, Bill no. 31 (formerly Bill no. 111), An Act to Redress Environmental Racism was introduced by ENRICH and former Member of the Legislative Assembly Lenore Zann but was not passed at its second reading.