Environment Agency officers at Southampton opening the containers sent by Wai Sang. ©letsrecycle.com         Described as waste plastic, the loads contained metal cans, as well as food waste. ©letsrecycle.com

Monday (February 19) saw Southall-based Alltrade Recycling Ltd pleading guilty to three charges under the same regulations, this time related to the export of hazardous waste televisions collected in Swansea.

And yesterday (February 20) saw South Yorkshire firm Grove Environmental pleading guilty to charges related to the shipment of waste to China.

Wai Sang

Containers exported by Wai Sang (Europe) Recycle Ltd was stopped in May 2006, and found to contain metal cans and food waste as well as mixed plastics, despite the exporters describing the shipments as waste plastic only.

Preston-based Wai Sang pleaded guilty in court on February 12 to two charges under the Transfrontier Shipment Regulations.

It told the court that the municipal waste had originally come from the Republic of Ireland via Northern Ireland.

An Environment Agency investigator told letsrecycle.com yesterday that the shipments had been found to contain waste items that could have come from Northamptonshire – and recycling bags from households in the London area.

Paul Shelton said he had alerted his colleagues in the South East region to his investigation's findings.

Wai Sang was fined £4,000 for its offences with £2,550 in legal costs to pay. The company was unavailable to comment.

Regulations

Under the regulations, recyclable waste can be exported for reprocessing abroad, but in order to send out the waste that was discovered, Wai Sang would have had to gain written consent from the environment agencies in all countries involved, as well as providing financial guarantees to cover the safe and lawful recycling of the waste.

Instead, the company had labelled it as fully-sorted recyclable plastic, which does not need such stringent controls to be exported.

The two containers from Wai Sang were stopped during a routine inspection at Southampton because of the "smell of rotting waste coming from them", the Agency said.

Wai Sang admitted responsibility for the loads, and paid for them to be sent to Preston-based Plastics Recovery, where the containers were unloaded in the presence of the Agency's investigations officers, who inspected and photographed the material.

But while the company said in court that waste had come from Southern Ireland, Mr Shelton, the Agency's environmental crime team officer, said: "One egg box, for example, was found to come from a farmer in Northamptonshire who only sold his eggs to the local area.

"Also, there were recycling bags were found to have come from London," Mr Shelton said, adding that he had informed his colleagues in the Agency's relevant local offices of the situation.

The Agency investigator suggested that the might not end with Wai Sang's prosecution.

Grove

Mexborough-based Grove Environmental was fined £4,000 and ordered to pay £4,004 costs by Doncaster Magistrates yesterday, following a six-month investigation by the Environment Agency.

The court was told that Grove had been asked to send waste paper for recycling in China by the company Mark Lyndon International BV, but that a driver had loaded mixed municipal waste into the containers instead.

The incident saw Agency officers examining 10 shipping containers at Southampton Docks, which were found to contain "bales of mixed household rubbish and waste including used nappies, bin bags, broken glass, plastic food containers and food waste. Maggots and flies were also present in many of the containers that were examined".

In mitigation, the defence said that Grove Environmental (Recycling) Ltd had no previous convictions, they co-operated fully with the Environment Agency’s investigation, and said that this was an error by the driver.

John Burns, Environment Agency ports project manager said: "Under the waste export regulations, separately sorted waste such as paper and card are classed as ‘green list’. That means that as long as the shipment consists of just one single unmixed material the Environment Agency normally would not need to be notified about these wastes.

"Mixed municipal waste, however, is treated differently under the EU Waste Shipment Regulation which means that the Environment Agency needs to be notified and approve of the shipment before it can go abroad. This is because sending unsorted waste to other countries potentially puts people and the environment at risk if it's not dealt with and recycled properly."

Alltrade Recycling Ltd

In the first illegal waste exports case brought by the Environment Agency Wales, Alltrade Recycling Ltd's director Mohamed Zafir pleaded guilty to three charges, as did his company, before Swansea magistrates.

The company was found to be exporting hazardous waste televisions from the UK to Dubai, collected from civic amenity sites in and around the Swansea area by the company Greenway Plastics & Electronic Recycling Ltd.

The charges related to Alltrade Recycling's failure to "notify the competent authority, Environment Agency Wales, of the intended export of hazardous waste", as well as failure to provide a financial guarantee for the proper treatment of the waste, and failure to gain written agreement between country of export and country of destination.

The company was fined £3,000 for the offences, and ordered to pay £2,749 in costs to Environment Agency Wales.

Bob James, Environment Agency Wales acting team leader for environmental crime, said after the case: "This is the first case of its kind to be enforced by Environment Agency Wales and should remind anyone who seeks to export waste materials that the rules have to be followed. In this case ignorance of the legislation by the defendant is no defence."