Health risk fears for storks in Europe over ‘junk food’ from landfill

Rubbish dumps can expose birds to contaminants, raising questions over whether landfill foraging helps or harms

By Vandy Widyalankara, 8 July 2026

From the article:

Prof Aldina Franco, an ecologist at the University of East Anglia (UEA), who was not involved in the research, said the study broke new ground by looking at the effect of contaminants on the storks.

Food found in landfill is like “junk food” for birds, she said. “It’s food that is rotting and it’s poor quality, and probably highly energetic. So, they can get leftover steaks or leftover fish, everything we throw away to landfill sites.”

Franco added that the picture is nuanced: “It is true that it can be damaging for individual storks to eat these types of food that can have contaminants and diseases. But from a population perspective, if you’d have 500 storks going to a landfill site, maybe a few will die from eating these contaminated items, but the majority will actually benefit from having extra food.”

[posted by Emily Roth]