Fines for toxic waste... the law is a joke.

dowie

dowie

dowie

Caporegime
Joined
29 Jan 2008
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Saw this story today, man dumped 900 tonnes of toxic waste in an industrial unit in Wales... he's ordered to clear it up but doesn't and so after 3 years he gets his day in court (waste still isn't removed) and he pleads guilty.

https://metro.co.uk/2022/01/06/soli...of-toxic-waste-on-industrial-estate-15876900/

His penalties for this:

"a 26-week sentence, suspended for a year." - so utterly meaningless for someone like him.

"He was fined £2,677 on top of £115 in costs, and will have to do 80 hours of unpaid work."

Fine is meaningless too he presumably made far more money from dumping this stuff, 80 hours of community service is a ball ache perhaps but it's still minor in comparison... 80 hours work in return for being able to enjoy the lucrative profits of a crime venture you admitted to and didn't have to spend a day in prison for is a pretty sweet deal.

Surely he should be paying the full cost of having another firm come and remove the waste? Make stuff like this unprofitable and you actually have a deterrent against it, otherwise it's just a cost of doing business for people who are happy to break the law.
 
‘I hope this result sends a message to all those involved in the illegal storing and depositing of waste that we take this activity extremely seriously, and we will always take the appropriate steps to protect our natural resources and the communities which we serve.’
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Sure seems like the message is illegally dump toxic waste and you'll get a slap on the wrist after first being asked nicely to remove it
 
Minusorange said:
Sure seems like the message is illegally dump toxic waste and you'll get a slap on the wrist after first being asked nicely to remove it
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There was a similar story a few years back too, coincidentally the guy involved in this one has the same surname too:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...lub-owner-Glenn-Tamplin-fined-waste-dump.html

Bigger fine this time:
The court found Tamplin had acted negligently to a high degree in committing the offences. He was fined a total of £45,000 and ordered to pay £30,789 costs.

Manns Waste Management was fined a total of £50,000 and ordered to pay £18,648 costs.
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Though I'm not sure he'll struggle to pay that and I do wonder if a profit was still made even when you include the fines:

6KfgsRf.jpg
 
A fine + community service for such environmental waste seems disproportionate, considering that people are being jailed for blasphemy or for something that they wrote on Twitter back in 2013.
 
The courts are inundated with stuff like this at the moment as regulators have been massively defunded and councils have been pushed to outsource to private companies their contacts, the lowest bidders are often linked with ocg now where you can get massive profits with a slap on the wrist taken into account.
 
I wonder if the prosecution went in there with twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used in evidence.
 
I new the minute it said toxic waste it would be something mundane and not spent uranium pellets.
Not that I approve of the sentence or fine, it's a joke. Needs to be a real deterant to this
 
Surely the appropriate penalty for this is simple to determine:

Unpaid work which involves cleaning it up (along with having to provide all your own PPE)
or
A fine which covers the full cost of cleaning it up

Like you say, <£3k total is a fraction of what he will have saved not disposing of it correctly, and 80 hours would barely make a dent in it.

Efour said:
I new the minute it said toxic waste it would be something mundane and not spent uranium pellets.
Click to expand...

Sure it's a bit of a click-bait title, but you still wouldn't want to live next to a pile of used tampons and nappies :p
 
Absolute joke how offences like this get treated. Am sure he will still have profited significantly from dumping the waste overall.

And not even banned from being a company director in future! He'll probably set up a new company in a year or so doing the same thing without even a mild inconvenience.

Seems like health and safety offences by small / medium businesses get this kind of lax treatment too. I know an ex-health and safety inspector who had great trouble getting to CPS to even bring anyone to court, even in cases where there has been serious injuries due to blatant breaches such as safety interlocks being deliberately bypassed on machinery. Then if a case did get brought to court the person responsible would basically get a slap on the wrist, unless someone had actually died in which case they might get a moderate prison sentence, fine, and ban from being a company director if they were unlucky.
 
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There is a guy who lives near me on a farm and he's been having people dump illegal waste in his fields for years. Every so often he'll get fined. He pays it and carries on. The cops have been up to his farm many times that eventually they give up. The whole family are known as rogues, not bad people. But ones that will make money where they can.
 
It's one nice thing about Sweden is they take this **** very serious and go as far as they can to track down flytippers and Muppets like him and make them pay fully for everything.

The recycling industry here is nuts.
 
Tired of these useless fines.

We need institute percentage of earnings (+1% every year that behaviour remains unchanged) on top of a flat punitive charge.
 
Its not so strange, the fine, when you know that if he declared bankruptcy then the EA have to pay to clean it up.

They can't do that as they don't have the funds themselves.
But, now he's been found guilty the business will have to become permitted- by the EA.
They charge according to the hazardous rating and each infringement pages up the price of a permit -EA quids in.

The land owner will most likely end up footing the bill as its now a known waste hazard.
 
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