IT is no accident the fictional gangster Tony Soprano listed his legitimate business as "waste management".
There's a lot of money in illegal dumping of car tyres, construction rubbish, toxic chemicals even entire vehicles.
That's because landfill restrictions are getting tighter and environmental taxes are increasing all the time. There's a big incentive to find ways of illegally disposing of waste by disguising it, burying it, setting fire to it at night or sending it round the country in "skip carousels" .
Now the Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland, has called for special courts to deal with Scotland's waste cowboys. He believes a special judicial focus on environmental crime would send "a powerful message" to polluters.
Organised gangs have long used illegal waste management to dispose of adversaries and launder drug money, but it's a lucrative business in itself, worth £30 million a year in Scotland alone. Around a dozen crime groups are thought to be involved in environmental crime here. Gangs will often buy a piece of waste land, like railway cuttings or disused collieries, and bury illegal waste in and under it. According to Detective Chief Superintendent, John Cuddihy, you can now smell the illegal landfill sites when you drive down the M74.
We support Mr Mulholland's attempts to deal with this problem, which is becoming one of the defining green crimes of this environmentally-conscious age. There is evidence that specialist courts, like those processing cases of domestic abuse, can improve conviction rates and alert the public to a neglected area of lawbreaking. It should certainly be a matter for discussion at the forthcoming meeting of the environmental crime task force, which brings together police, prosecution, councils, government and green watchdogs.
However, we should be cautious about subdividing the criminal justice system for presentational purposes. The risk is that other crimes which do not have their own judicial machinery might be seen as somehow less important. We cannot have a system where there are special courts for every category of offence. We need to know that these bodies, which can take on a life of their own, would do more than merely "send a message" and would actually help tackle and prevent wrong-doing. Setting up a special court may be attractive to hard pressed prosecutors will it assist the police in addressing the problem at source?
For, of course, the gangland waste-tippers aren't the only parties to this environmental crime. Many businesses fail to conduct due diligence on subcontractors who offer to deal with their toxic rubbish at attractive but unrealistic prices. Is enough being done to alert legitimate businesses to their responsibilities here? Is enough being done to trace the origins of illegally dumped waste - especially the more dangerous chemicals - to the companies that originally produced it?
The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) needs to issue clear guidelines to firms on the reasonable cost of disposing of different categories of waste. The police must then start to ask questions about the probity of companies who turn to the Tony Sopranos of this world to deal with their disposal issues. Gangland waste companies are not hard to identify. Construction firms, for example, should know the cost of legitimate disposal and have a responsibility to interrogate those who offer cheap quotes. We need to address the "no questions asked" culture that seems to prevail in many boardrooms among executives who think that illegal dumping is a victimless crime.
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