Mucking Marshes Landfill was a major landfill site servicing London, close to the hamlet of Mucking. Covering hundreds of acres of former gravel quarry, it was one of the largest landfills in Western Europe and has been filled for decades with municipal and commercial waste floated thirty miles down the River Thames in barges to Mucking Wharf. The barges, each carrying dozens of distinctive yellow containers, are a familiar, though rarely commented-upon, sight along the Thames through Central London. Once the barges have traveled 30 miles (48 km) downstream from Walbrook Wharf, mechanical cranes at Mucking Wharf unload the containers onto trucks. The trucks make their way up the artificial mound created by decades of garbage compaction that towers over the surrounding flat landscape.