The situation surrounding the sale of New Earth Solutions Group has seen the company avoid a fine of up to £1.3 million after the asphyxiation death of a worker in 2014.

The company, which was sold out of administration to Leeds-based DM Opco in June and then to Irish waste management firm PandaGreen last month, was instead given a fine of just £80,000 at Maidstone Crown Court yesterday (7 November) following the death of Neville Watson.

Watson, 39, a father of two, was working close to a pile of green waste material at the company’s in-vessel composting site at Blaise in Kent on 9 August 2014, when waste collapsed on him after he had connected a shredder to the loading shovel he was driving.

An investigation by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that Watson was suffocated underneath the eight-metre-high pile while colleagues tried to dig him out.

It was the first time that Watson had been asked to operate the shredding machine and the court heard that the machine was usually controlled remotely from the loading vehicle’s cab.

The HSE concluded that the company had failed to undertake and prepare risk assessments or safe systems of work for the management of stockpiles, and had not provided adequate training.

A representative of the company had previously pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act, and the company wa susbsequently fined £80,000 and ordered to pay costs of £38,373.

The presiding judge said that had the company not entered administration in June, the fine would have been between £600,000 and £1.3 million.

As it is, the company has been given six months to pay the fine. New Earth Solutions investors were told in June that they were ‘unlikely’ to recover any funds from the sale to DM Opco, two days after it had entered administration, and a report published by its administrators suggested that creditors were likely to miss out on over £9 million through the sale.

The company entered administration after talks with an unnamed plant developer to purchase the company fell though. Its five sites – two IVC facilities and three mechanical biological treatment facilities – are now run by the Irish PandaGreen firm.

No ‘structured training’ in place

Following the judgement, HSE inspector Guy Widdowson said: “The request for Mr Watson to carry out the shredding operation was made without any form of structured training being in place.

“The company failed to ensure that Mr Watson was supervised by an employee trained in the task he was carrying out, particularly in light of the fact that he had never carried out the task before.”

Health and safety in the waste industry

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 injuries 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.

This year, the number of deaths investigated by the HSE, which only deals with work-based incidents and therefore does not include road-traffic accidents, has already exceeded last year’s total after a man was found dead at a Milton Keynes materials recycling facility (MRF) operated by Viridor in August. This followed a tragic incident in July at a metals recycling site in Birmingham, when a wall holding back tonnes of scrap metal collapsed, killing five workers.

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