An Essex landowner has been handed a suspended eight month prison sentence and ordered to carry out 180 hours unpaid work for allowing an illegal waste site to be run on his farm for years. The landowner, Mr Roger Frederick Phipps, was also fined £15,000 for breaching two planning enforcement notices. The prison sentence was…
A long-awaited Code of Practice for materials recycling facilities has been launched for consultation today (February 1) by resource minister Lord de Mauley alongside a Quality Action Plan. The draft code of practice will require all materials recycling facilities (MRFs) over a certain size to measure the quality of their inputs and outputs. The results…
Waste Industry Health & Safety Guidance. A new health and safety strategy for the waste industry has been launched in a bid to cut incident rates by 10% year-on-year and reduce the number of fatalities to zero. The four year strategy, which was launched at the waste sector’s first health and safety summit last week…
A decision by Stoke-on-Trent City Council to enhance the city’s recycling collection service has left the authority facing a claim of around £645,000 from its energy from waste (EfW) contractor for not providing enough waste to feed the facility. The council is facing legal action from Hanford Waste Services (HWS), which operates the city’s EfW…
Government Announces £40m Support for Low‑Carbon Energy and Green Manufacturing The government pledged an additional £40 million of support for the low-carbon energy and advanced green manufacturing sector in the UK, building on the support made available to these sectors at Budget 2009. It said that amongst other projects, the funding will enable additional support…
Two Hull-based waste businesses were fined a total of £36,000 after admitting to operating a regulated facility without the required permit. At Hull Magistrates’ Court Last month (March 28), Petrotech Services Ltd was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £5,700 costs, while its sister company Petrochemical Services Ltd was fined £26,000 and ordered to pay…
Waste and recycling businesses are facing ‘significant’ rises in their insurance premiums, which could rise further after a major insurer pulled out of the sector. Last week Catlin Insurance Company said they were no longer underwriting risks for the waste industry, having made a net loss during five years of covering waste businesses. Stephen Wise, business…
Hampshire firm Solent Waste Services has been fined £12,000 and ordered to pay £19,752 in costs after a worker was run over by a reversing digger at its yard in Eastleigh. Martin Jewell, 49, from Gosport, sustained ‘life-changing’ injuries, including a double fracture to his right shin bone and broken bones in both feet, in…
Local authorities are putting legitmate scrap dealers’s business in jeopardy because many are failing to issue licences six months after new legislation came into force, according to the British Metals Recycling Association (BMRA). On 1 October 2013, the Scrap Metal Dealers Act introduced a mandatory licensing regime for both mobile and site-based scrap dealers to…
A large number of waste companies will require more expensive permits and will be regulated to ‘more exacting standards’ under new rules coming into effect over the next year. Around 2,500 waste operators are likely to be affected by the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED), new Environment Agency (EA) calculations have revealed. The IED specifies a…