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…
A dispute over whether local authorities should be exempt from paying VAT on trade waste collections could go to the courts, after an application for Judicial Review was submitted earlier this month. Under current rules established by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in 2011, councils are exempt from paying value added tax on commercial…
Scrap metal giant EMR was sentenced at Warwickshire crown court on Friday (December 19) after pleading guilty to safety failings at the Kingsbury site. The court heard how William Ward, 56, from Handsworth, Sheffield, was killed when part of a 33-tonne metal barge he was dismantling collapsed on top of him in October 2011. The…
Lincolnshire-based metal recycler BW Riddle has been fined £70,000 and ordered to pay £18,000 in costs after one of its workers suffered broken ribs in an incident at the firm’s Bourne site in February 2013. Lincolnshire Crown Court heard on December 22 that the 49-year-old worker was carrying out maintenance on the firm’s sloping conveyor…