CRAWFORD’S RAMBLINGS ON WASTE
Crawford’s Ramblings on waste
Duty of Care and all that!
It’s over forty three years since a load of drums containing cyanide was dumped in a brickyard in the midlands, prompting one of the most irate public denunciations of the waste business ever seen. The Chairman of NAWDC (the predecessor of ESA) was reportedly
A candid, pragmatic and occasionally irreverent view of current waste management issues from someone who doesn’t have to worry about promotion or clients!
‘outraged’ at the time (even more so when it was alleged one of his company’s trucks might have been involved in the incident!) And so within a few weeks, we had the
Deposit of Poisonous Waste Act 1972 on the Statute Books. It was a classic Civil Service approach; anybody who had waste to which the Act applied, had to pre-notify his/her waste authority and the disposer’s waste authority of their intention to dispose of the waste. The pre-notification included a record of the nature and quantity of the waste and allowed sufficient time to alert the authorities involved about each individual consignment (special ‘season ticket’ arrangements were available for regular consignments). From the contractor’s point of view it meant satisfying a wide range of enforcement authorities’ policies (no EA or SEPA in those days) and from time to time different councils took different stances on how the same types of waste should be treated and/ or disposed of. For the regulator, it looked like they’d been given more control over this part of the waste business. When the load was actually dumped, the
disposer completed their part of the form and a copy was sent off to the producer’s council. At one time I was working for a regulatory council and we noticed a load of
‘lagging with 8-10% asbestos content’ had been pre-notified weeks ago, but we’d never received the disposer’s part of the form. We phoned up the contractor (known locally for sailing close to the wind) and asked where was the load? ‘It’s still on the truck’ was the reply: ‘The engine blew up and we’ve had problems getting it back on the road. But, it’s going to landfill next Tuesday afternoon.’ Being a bit suspicious, we asked our colleagues in the disposer’s council to sample the load when it entered the landfill. It was ‘mixed waste with 35% asbestos content’. And we thought we’d won a watch! Here was a contractor who
could not only make one load of notifiable waste disappear, but magically make another one appear. We thought we were on for a prosecution. So we hightailed it to the Procurator Fiscal’s Office (they prosecute criminal cases in Scotland) all fired up. The Fiscal politely listened to our tale then she gently said, ‘I can see the defence’s case right away. They’ll say that the office manager is normally in charge of these very important forms, but he took sick that day and it was left to wee Jimmy or Mary in the office to fill out the forms. It’s simply a slip of the pen. The Sheriff would probably ask me why I’m wasting his time with such trivia’. And that was it: All our hopes of ‘making an example’ (with attendant publicity) dashed. And so a lot of cynicism crept in over the
years about the effectiveness of using documentation to ‘trace’ waste consignments, so much so, that when the Duty of Care was first mooted, I and many colleagues thought it looked far better on paper than it actually was. When the Scottish councils were
reorganised in 1996 and SEPA was created, the former assumed that the latter would take a leading role in ensuring the Duty of Care was adhered to. But when a colleague asked for SEPA’s help in dealing with fly-tipped fruit and vegetables (in a street festooned with fruiterers), the latter were reluctant to accommodate his request that the traders be asked to exhibit copies of their waste transfer notes (most didn’t use the council’s commercial waste services). SEPA’s reasons at the time remain unclear but I was delighted to see that Fylde Borough Council recently managed to secure a prosecution against a Lytham trader who was unable to produce copies of transfer notes showing where his shop waste had gone. Magistrates fined the business over a grand and I hope the message has gone out to all those traders who masquerade as householders at recycling centres to dump their commercial waste that they’re not only stealing a financial advantage over their competitors (who are paying the proper rate for commercial waste collection and disposal), but also denying local waste contractors their livelihood.
By John Crawford
John Crawford originally trained in municipal engineering in a Clyde Coast Burgh in the late 60s. After a decade there he moved to PD Beatwaste Ltd (afterwards Wimpey Waste Management Ltd). He then joined the Civil Engineering Dept at Strathclyde University before holding senior waste management posts at Renfrew, Hamilton, Inverness and East Ayrshire Councils. He is a Fellow of CIWM, and served on its Scottish Centre Council from 1988-2009.
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SHM August 2015 Issue 117
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