Buried: The Last Witness took home Grand for Smoke Trail Productions at the New York Festivals Radio Awards 2025.

Airing on BBC Radio 4 and hosted by Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, this documentary is a landmark investigative series that exposes the harm done to British communities by secret dumps of toxic chemicals.

Ashby and Taylor unearth the evidence of a dead witness, which proves that the US company Monsanto contaminated the British landscape and food chain with banned and carcinogenic ‘forever’ chemicals; they discover that tens of thousands of tons of PCBs are illegally buried near communities and have poisoned groundwater and farms for decades; they partner with the Royal Society of Chemistry to access unprecedented testing of British soil and food.

Buried: The Last Witness was targeted to a mass-market audience and kept listeners’ interest with a forensic focus on storytelling, blending true-crime, Hollywood whodunnit and narrative twists, with one of the most important – and scary – environmental disasters of our time.