New study to ‘address the challenge’ of waste crime

Image: Environment Agency

The Environmental Services Association Education Trust (ESAET) has announced that it has commissioned a new report into how the ‘challenge of increasing levels of waste crime’ can be tackled in the UK.

The body, set up to ‘commission research and promote education across society to better the environment’, has appointed environmental consultancy Eunomia Research & Consulting Ltd to undertake the work, which aims to assess the scale of waste-related crime and ‘evaluate its impacts on business, local communities, public finance and the environment’.

Areas of focus will reportedly include: illegal waste sites; illegal storage sites (and those that prepare waste for illegal export); the ‘deliberate misclassification of waste’ (such as labelling hazardous waste as non-hazardous); and flytipping.

The study will also seek to make recommendations regarding how best to combat waste crime and how to approach regulation and enforcement of waste-related activities.

According to ESAET, the study has been commissioned as the ‘rewards for [waste crime] are now far greater than previously’, in part due to the escalating cost of landfill tax, and pressure to meet waste diversion targets. As such, waste crime activities in the UK are high, ‘perhaps unprecedented’, and can undermine legitimate waste business activity, and damage the environment.

This erosion of confidence, said ESAET, could ‘undermine investment in vital waste infrastructure and technology and therefore limit growth within the sector and the UK as whole’. It added that with ‘public funds stretched, creative ideas are [now] needed regarding the approach to enforcement and how this can be funded’.

ESAET’s Trustee Barry Dennis explained: “Combating waste crime is of critical importance to the environment and the waste and resources management industry as it undermines the economics of legitimate, responsible operators. ESAET has commissioned Eunomia to provide recommendations on how best to tackle this problem and we look forward to taking these proposals forward with all interested parties soon after the New Year.”

Challenge of waste crime is ‘enormous’

Mat Crocker, Head of Illegals & Waste at the Environment Agency (EA), welcomed the report, saying: “Waste crime causes harm to the environment, misery for local people and undermines legitimate business. We look forward to working with all parties to help address these important issues.”

The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) also voiced support for the report, with CIWM Chief Executive Steve Lee saying: “We are working closely with the Environment Agency, Defra, and local government to put a stop to waste crime, but the challenge remains enormous. It is important that this area of enforcement is treated as a priority, and we welcome this initiative by ESAET.”

Raising the profile of waste crime

The report follows on from several high-profile cases of waste crime hitting the headlines, including one that saw police and the EA arrest a man on the runway of Heathrow airport as he tried to flee the country to avoid paying back over £800,000 from the proceeds of his illegal waste site.

There have also been calls from industry for sentences for environmental crime to be strengthened. Earlier this year, the National Flytipping Prevention Group and the EA, raised concerns with the Sentencing Council (SC) – a division of the Ministry of Justice – that ‘the levels of fines currently being given in the courts for environmental offences are not high enough and so neither reflect the seriousness of the offences committed nor have a sufficient deterrent effect on offenders’.

As such, the SC issued draft sentencing guidelines that urged courts to introduce fines relative to the seriousness of the offence in question, so that offenders ‘are hit in the pocket as well as deterred from committing more crime’. It argued that as magistrates have a ‘lack of familiarity with sentencing these types of offences… due to the infrequency with which they come to court’, they also tend to have ‘a lack of confidence in assessing their seriousness and pitching fines at appropriate levels’.

Read more about waste crime.