An animal rendering and food waste disposal and recycling firm has been fined £250,000, after three employees were overcome by toxic gases at a facility in Stoke-on-Trent.

Stafford Crown Court heard on Friday (10 June) how an employee of John Pointon & Sons Limited accessed a compartment within an animal waste trailer on 23 April 2014 to free animal waste.

The employee, William James, was overcome by the toxic gases, including hydrogen sulphide – short-term and high-level exposure to which can cause death of brain cells, accumulation of fluid in the brain and death – and a reduced oxygen atmosphere, causing him to lose consciousness. Colleague Thomas Lewinski entered the compartment after noticing that James was missing and found him lying face down. As he tried to help, he too was overcome by the fumes.

The two men were then found by other staff, including Steve White, who told the court he 'felt his muscles shutting down and his legs going to jelly'. James suffered bruising and a head wound which required stitches, while Lewinski spent five days in hospital. All three men have required counselling, and James, who took redundancy from the company nine months after the incident, has been unable to work since. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated and stated that the ‘preventable incident’ could have resulted in fatalities. It also pointed out that the company had been prosecuted twice before for two fatal incidents that involved confined space entry within a processing plant.

The company, based in Cheddleton, Stoke-on-Trent, was fined £250,000 with costs of £37,362, after pleading guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997. Sentencing the firm Judge Michael Chambers said: "The company failed to identify the potential for trailers to be tipped with the sheeting in situ. By 2014 they had long been aware that rotting carcasses cause toxic gasses and that employees might be required to enter a confined space , so would be at risk."

In June last year the company was fined £660,000 for allowing steam from elsewhere in the system to enter an industrial cooker in which Mark Bullock, 50, was carrying out repairs. Bullock suffered 90 per cent burns and died 24 hours after the incident in 2011.

Another employee, Glyn Thompson, a 45 year-old electrician, was killed at the same site in 2004 when he fell into offal processing equipment while trying to rescue a colleague who had slipped into a recycling line. On that occasion the company was fined £680,000, which was reduced to £540,000 on appeal.

Waste industry health and safety

The waste industry has previously been branded one of the most dangerous to work in, with the most recent HSE statistics for the waste management industry in the UK recording five fatal injuries to waste workers and six to members of the public in 2014/15. In the last five years, there have been 33 worker deaths in the waste sector.

The HSE figures suggest that 1,879 employer-reported non-fatal injuries occurred in the waste sector in 2014/15, almost 70 per cent of which were due to either slips, trips, falls or being struck by an object.

Between 2010/11 and 2014/15, an average of 5,000 cases of non-fatal workplace injury have been reported in the waste sector each year. This represents 4.1 per cent of all workers, twice the all-industry rate of 2.0 per cent.

Further information is available in the HSE’s ‘Statistics on fatal injuries in the workplace in Great Britain 2015’.