Owners of a waste transfer station in Wellington have been fined £32,000 after allowing hazardous waste on the site, contrary to their permit.
Taunton Deane Magistrates were told how Anthony and Brenda Palfrey, who run Wellington Waste, Higher Poole, had allowed unsuitable waste including asbestos to be deposited on their site, which is classed as a non-hazardous waste site.
The couple accepted responsibility and said that the error had come about because they had mistakenly filled in an incorrect form.
Five skips of asbestos were found on site outside the licensed area during a routine site inspection last year.
Wellington Waste were re-visited weeks later, by which time all five skips of asbestos had been put into one larger skip and moved into the licensed area.
Wellington Waste said this was because the people who made the original waste delivery had failed to collect the material.
Anthony and Brenda pleaded guilty to three offences of breaching the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and were fined £32,000 plus costs of £982.
Catherine Lockwood from the Environment Agency said,
“By bringing these cases to court we want to draw attention to the fact that licence holders have a legal responsibility to dispose of waste properly and that might mean returning it to the person who deposited it.”
Wellington Waste stated that when unacceptable waste is found, it is their policy to contact the person responsible to dispose of it correctly. They apparently did this and also provided names and addresses of those responsible to the agency.
“Our error came about due to the fact we failed to fill out the correct form. We tried to comply with our licence by putting the waste into one skip. This complied with the allowance of having one skip of permitted waste within the licensed area. While we take full responsibility, we feel that as we have never been in trouble during our entire 25 years of trading, we are just an easy target for their publicity machine. Even the local agency representative was apologetic as he felt the fine was far in excess of the crime, especially as we had accepted responsibility for our error and pleaded guilty. This was not irresponsibility on our part but simply an admin error. We have learned valuable lessons from this and have put in stringent methodologies to ensure compliance in the future.”
We at The Skip agree that the fine seems pretty hefty, but it’s a lesson we can all note to avoid such a penalty in future.
