Northern Irish truck dismantling company McGeough Trucks and Spares Ltd has been fined £550 and given a £7,500 confiscation order for waste offences.

On Thursday (1 May), Newry Crown Court handed the company its penalty after finding it guilty of three breaches of the Waste and Contaminated Land (NI) Order 1997.

The waste offences related to the firm ‘knowingly’ depositing and keeping controlled waste ‘in a manner likely to cause pollution to the environment or harm to human health’ and without the relevant waste licenses.

Case details

The court heard howIn March 2009, officers from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) visited a three-acre site operating under McGeough Trucks and Spares Ltd on Edenappa Road, Jonesborough.

On arrival, officers found heaps of waste (some hazardous) ‘estimated to be piled up over seven metres high’, including ‘hundreds of tyres’, scrap cars and lorries, vehicle parts, batteries, engine blocks (some of which still contained oil), and general scrap steel.

Officers also found evidence of waste having been burnt on site, along with ‘several oil spills’.

The company Director, Linda McGeough, was on site and, during an interview under caution, stated that the site was active and that vehicles were brought in and de-polluted on site. She also stated that the site did not have an interceptor for the collection of run-off chemicals from the site.

However, the site did not have the necessary waste licenses to treat the waste vehicles, and as the ground (on which hazardous wastes such as mineral oils were stored) was permeable, the company was found likely to ‘cause pollution to the environment or harm to human health’.

Indeed, the officers identified that there were ‘clear signs of vegetative distress’ beside a ditch where ‘polluting residues’ were drained. This was of concern as the ditch discharged into a small tributary river that joins the River Flurry in County Louth.

Subsequent visits to the site by NIEA officers in August and November 2009 and March 2010, found that the site was continuing to be used to deposit and treat waste vehicles without the necessary waste licences, and as such, they called McGeough Trucks and Spares Ltd to court.

At the sentencing hearing on Thursday, NIEA said the ‘avoidance of the required conditions and measures necessary in an authorised treatment facility by the defendants, conferred benefits in terms of business operation, [and] increased competitiveness and financial advantage through avoidance of fees, capital costs for installing environmental control measures, and costs for proper disposal of waste (particularly hazardous waste)’.

Cracking down on waste crime

Northern Ireland has recently announced a push to crack down on waste crime, with Environment Minister Mark H Durkan announcing last month that he was to streamline the current legislative framework for waste management and create anew Resource Efficiency Directorate staffed by officers with 'appropriate skills' within NIEA.

Although details of these actions are yet to be announced, they are all to be completed 'by the end of June'.

The move seeks to fulfil Durkan’s December 2013 pledge to ‘fundamentally change’ how waste is managed in the country, following a ‘sobering’ report into illegal dumping. The report by Chris Mills, the former Director of the Welsh Environment Agency, ‘A review of waste disposal at the Mobuoy site and the lessons learnt for the future regulation of the waste industry in Northern Ireland’, outlined the case of an illegal site in Campsie, where 516,000 tonnes of waste were discovered by the NIEA in an area adjacent to the River Faughan in Mobuoy near Derry.

The key finding from the report was that the regulation of waste in Northern Ireland is ‘highly vulnerable to criminal infiltration’. As such, Mills recommended that the government become ‘more rigorous and robust in regulatory activity to stop criminals entering the waste industry’.

Read more about Northern Ireland’s review of waste management.