Kent company fined £40,000 for illegal waste activity
Two Kent waste companies have been ordered to pay a total of £44,294 for illegally tipping waste on flood plain near the River Medway. Fastrac Contractors and Utilities Limited, of Cuxton Industrial Estate, were found guilty in their absence and fined £40,000 with £1650 costs, at Sevenoaks Magistrates Court. Bennett Grab Services, of Burleigh Sole Street, Cobham, Gravesend, pleaded guilty and were fined £2000, with costs of £404.
Charges were brought against both companies when an Environment Agency investigation discovered building waste and rubble being tipped at River House, Station Road, Cuxton, which was not covered by an environmental permit.
The court heard that on a site visit in 2013 Fastrac company director Mr Paul Davies admitted to having tipped 80 loads of waste at the site; the Environment Agency issued a letter requiring Fastrac to cease the deposit of waste at this location until getting the appropriate permission.
However, in November 2013 after no further information had been supplied by Fastrac the Environment Agency served statutory notices on both Fastrac and the landowner to provide waste transfer information about wastes deposited at this site. These revealed that a further 47 lorry loads of waste had been received at the site since the letter of 12 July 2013.
Man handed suspended prison sentence for illegal waste activities
Christopher John Nash, 34, of James Street South in Murton, appeared at Peterlee Magistrates’ Court on Friday, September 18, where he pleaded guilty to 2 offences of operating a waste facility without a permit and illegally depositing and burning waste.
He was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison, suspended for 12 months, ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work in the community, and pay £2,500 costs and an £80 victim surcharge. He was also required to remove the remaining waste and remediate the site.
In April 2014, Environment Agency officers saw large amounts of waste in the yard together with a fire burning, and Nash was advised to stop bringing waste to the site.
During July the same year more waste and evidence of burning was seen at the site, with Nash telling officers he’d been away and it was down to the people working for him. He was given further advice and told again to stop bringing in waste.
Several visits in the following months saw fresh waste, including metal, sofas, carpet, paper and cardboard left at the site and in October Nash was interviewed by officers. He said he’d had a reduction in staff numbers, and added that he was no longer taking waste in at the site.
But further visits saw new waste deposits and evidence of burning, and he was interviewed a second time in April 2015, where he accepted he had said he would clear the site of waste, but his financial situation had made that difficult.
Repeated raw sewage leaks, lead to one of the largest water company fines
Severn Trent Water Limited has been fined £480,000, ordered to pay Environment Agency Costs of £13,675.38 as well as a victim surcharge of £120.
Proceedings were brought by the Environment Agency following repeated pollution incidents where raw sewage leaked into a farmer’s field and a pond in a private fishery. That pond leads into the Kingsforth Brook at Bramley near Rotherham, which in turn leads downstream to the Maltby Dyke. The incidents occurred on 25 February 2014 and 26 March 2014. The company had been warned on 2 previous occasions for similar incidents at the same location.
The Severn Trent pipeline that transported raw sewage to a treatment plant ruptured at the same point, which led to 4 pollution incidents within a year. The pollution directly contributed to fish deaths and samples taken by the Environment Agency suggested that it had also affected the local invertebrate community including freshwater shrimps.
In passing sentence, the Judge stated that both offences were committed negligently and that the harm to the environment was localised, and therefore minor, albeit significant to those affected by the incident. The offences were aggravated by the fact that there had been previous warnings issued for 2 earlier incidents.
|
