Waste crime is expanding at quite an alarming rate. That’s not just my view – I’ve heard it expressed by the police, the fire service, senior Environment Agency (EA) officers and my local MP. It seems far beyond the capability of the current regulatory system, split between the EA, HM Revenue and Customs and local authorities, to keep in check.

Companies can be established with no intention of running a sustainable waste operation. Instead, they conveniently go bust, leaving authorities to clear up the mess – all too often, the ashes of a fire where there is a strong suspicion of arson. Those who keep within the rules find it tough to compete, and previously honest owners may turn to crime to survive financially.

I came to this issue without experience in the waste industry. I retired 10 years ago as a European Sales Manager for IBM, but over the last three years, I’ve learned a great deal about certain parts of the sector (landfill sites, transfer stations, refuse-derived fuel (RDF) operations, composting) as a local resident trying, almost in vain and often in frustration, to control the worst excesses of a company operating a landfill on the edge of our village.

A sales manager knows that salesmen will always push boundaries to maximise earnings – sometimes regardless of the best interests of their company. The same applies in the waste industry, with some owners and directors prepared to push profitability beyond the edge of legality. This behaviour demands effective regulation to control it, but in some critical areas, such oversight seems sorely lacking.

Yet there are a number of initiatives that could help regulators and level the playing field between honest and dishonest operators. To introduce all of them might be considered an attempt to ‘boil the ocean’, but to implement none of them appears to leave regulators ‘fiddling while waste burns’.

Taking their fill

The largest single attraction that a landfill site has to the criminal fraternity is taxation on waste. A 20-tonne load of active waste will attract approximately £1,600 of Landfill Tax. But, a 20-tonne load of inert waste will attract only £50, and engineering and restoration material none at all.

Two common landfill frauds exploit these opportunities: loads that purport to be inert or restoration materials that in reality are general waste, often shredded to resemble ‘fines’; and ‘ghost lorries’ that tip their loads without any record.

The whole Landfill Tax collection system seems to be based largely on trust. Even where individual loads are caught out, regulators seem ready to accept it as the result of an error. In the rare cases where court action results, penalties seldom (if ever) seem proportionate to the fraudulent profits.

Some straightforward regulatory steps would make this area of the industry less attractive to fraudsters:

• Require automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras at the gate and weighbridge of every site, which the EA and HMRC can monitor remotely.
• Require CCTV of the waste tipping areas.
• Closely examine cases where loads travel unusually long distances. It’s hard to see the economic case for lengthy journeys unless tax, the largest element of gate fees, is being avoided.
• Closely examine the accounts of landfill companies (and associated businesses) whose profitability is out of step with industry norms.
• Require annual topographical surveys by approved contractors to compare increases in landform sizes against the declared tonnages shipped.

Action stations

The problems in waste management are by no means limited to landfill sites. Visits to waste transfer stations (WTSs) have left me with significant concerns: for starters, WTSs sometimes have no limitation on their environmental permit concerning the waste they can store. If it accumulates, stored waste can become a substantial liability – not always properly reflected in a company’s accounts – and a significant incentive for arson and voluntary liquidation of the company.

I’m also concerned that, rather than being recycled, some of the waste is simply ‘processed’ – perhaps shredded – and renamed as ‘restoration materials’ or ‘engineering materials’, before going to landfill. I can’t help but wonder how much impact this misclassified material has on our waste arisings and recycling figures…

Both of these problems could be tackled using some of the following measures:

• Install ANPR cameras as above.
• Control to the lowest practical levels waste tonnages that can be stored at WTSs and associated land.
• Define all waste shipments with a combustible element above 10 per cent as active waste attracting the full Landfill Tax (which HMRC has now indicated will happen).
• Conduct a programme of WTS inspections to ensure that active waste is properly classified; then monitor subsequent declared outputs to ensure consistency.
• Inspect WTSs whose returns show a high percentage of inert waste going to landfill.
• Require a full audit of tonnages entering and leaving a WTS to ensure that, as far as possible, all tonnages are accounted for from source to destination.
• Require companies to account for the value or liability of the waste they store, reducing the risk that a false impression of financial viability is given to investors and others.

Nobody’s fuel

I have been told by the EA and the local fire services that there are widespread issues with RDF across much of England. Problems can arise when RDF manufacturers find they cannot dispose of material, perhaps because they have included materials that are illegal to burn. Ingenious ways of disposing of unwanted bales include dumping them on unsuspecting farmers’ land disguised as haylage bales, or abandoning the stuff in warehouses. And, at one stage recently, RDF fires were averaging more than one per week.

The basic problem with RDF is that you make money when you acquire it, but it costs money to dispose of it. The disposal price is somewhat volatile, and often the temptation is to hold on to the material and wait for the market to improve. It’s a risky business for legitimate operators – rather less so for operations that take the money to receive the waste with no intention to ever dispose of it legally.

To bring the RDF industry under control, the following measures could be applied:

• Require any company actively creating an RDF stockpile to have proportionate contracts in place, whether with domestic disposal facilities or overseas shipping contracts.
• Require all RDF facilities to be insured for the cost of clean-up if fire breaks out.
• Ensure RDF bales are date stamped, and prohibit the storage of bales that are more than six months old. (A Viridor spokesman has stated that older bales are virtually useless.)
• Tightly limit the amount of un-baled RDF allowed to be stored on a site.
• Use CCTV to monitor the number of bales stored, and use daily snapshots to track the age of the bales.
• Limit the tonnage of RDF bales that can be stored and require companies to make financial provisions.
• Require all companies to include in their accounts the estimated disposal cost of all stored RDF.

Tighter monitoring and regulation is rarely called for by industry, but it is surely in the interests of the legitimate waste sector to work with regulators to make the system more robust. Even if it proves impossible to wholly eradicate the criminal element, there is surely an urgent need to make their lives a lot more difficult. The EA needs to be resourced for the job, with the costs offset through additional Landfill Tax receipts and saved clear-up costs. Until that is done, the impunity of reckless waste operators to blight the lives of residents in areas surrounding waste sites will continue unchallenged.

This article is a version of one originally published on the Isonomia website. For more, visit: www.isonomia.co.uk