Fly-tippers' lorries crushed

Daily Hazard, n83 , December 2004

With the rise of illegal dumping, or "fly-tipping", of waste in the Greater London area and throughout the rest of the country, the Environment Agency (EA) has introduced the Flycapture scheme to try and stop this dangerous and polluting practice. Success in the London area has lead to two lorries involved in illegal dumping being impounded and crushed.

Flycapture, a national fly-tipping database, was set up in April this year with funding from Defra to help the EA, Local Authorities (LAs) and other agencies to work together to collect and share information about fly-tipping criminals. In this case the two lorries were found to be responsible for at least 27 fly-tipping incidents in Croydon, Lambeth, Wandsworth and Merton, so the authorities there acted together to track them down. When the lorries were finally found, without their drivers, they were impounded. As no-one came forward to claim the vehicles the authorities used their powers to ensure the lorries were never used for this work again - and had them crushed.

Flycapture's web-based database can be used to record information about dumping incidents such as location, what was tipped and if available, the details of the vehicles involved. The authorities can then search this information and see if there are any patterns that might lead to the capture of the criminals.

The EA say that is not unusual for vehicles used in organised fly-tipping cases such as these to be stolen or at least have the current owner unregistered and lost in a chain of cash sales, leaving the criminal hard to trace if they are not caught in the act.

The EA say there is a lot of this kind of organised criminal activity going on and the cost of cleaning it up costs council tax payers millions to clear up. Nationally, fly-tipping is increasing with the EA dealing with 5,300 incidents in 2003 which was almost 40% more than in 2001. The EA takes just 200 prosecution for fly-tipping every year and no-one has ever been sent to jail once convicted (check this ). Some other authorities report dealing with as many as 20,000 incidents annually, though many of these are small-scale incidents involving bags of household waste thoughtlessly dumped. Recently there have been no statistics for London as there was no authority in overall charge, each LA or EA region dealing with the issue themselves. Flycapture will help give an accurate London picture.

While much of what is fly-tipped is domestic waste, gardening waste, building or demolition materials etc. some of it can be highly hazardous. Asbestos and chemicals are now more expensive and difficult to dispose of legally and they are fly-tipped frequently. Construction waste counts for 25% of fly-tipped materials with just less than 10% being tyres.

Alan D'Arcy, waste policy manager at the EA said: "The illegal dumping of waste is a growing problem that can involve serious, organised criminals, often moving around between different areas and regions. Flycapture is helping us and LAs to identify trends and so target our resources more effectively and, as in this case, weed out the serious offenders."