By John Crawford

AT a time when the press was constrained for stories, it’s not surprising that fly-tipping came to the fore with photos of black bags, furniture and all sorts of discarded materials dumped in laybys, farmers’ fields and at the gates of many waste recycling centres that have been closed. All of it has been blamed on the councils for closing their facilities and suspending some recyclate collection services. But closer examination of these photos suggests that a lot of the dumped material would never have been allowed into a recycling centre in the first place, or collected by the council as “household waste”: for example, radiators, baths, sinks, timber, bricks, slates, cement and old plasterboard and the like.

People have been fly-tipping rubbish for decades. Some of it is simply down to them having no qualms about polluting the environment (one of the reasons why we have an appalling litter problem in the UK); some is down to the laziness of people who can’t be bothered finding out when the recycling centres are open and on discovering these closed, dump their rubbish at the first opportunity; and some for financial gain due to landfill tax now being over £94/tonne before the costs of disposal is added, creating a lucrative market for the “man and van” businesses who will clear out your loft/garage/garden for cash but won’t ask you to sign a waste transfer form before they leave your home.

Some councils haven’t helped matters by introducing charges for collecting garden waste. This has put unnecessary pressure on the family’s residual waste bin. “Eating at home” has also meant more household waste than usual, so residual waste bins are fuller than normal, but that increase has been offset by the collapse of the commercial sector that has meant councils having far less of their waste to collect than ever before. And as garden waste is one of the heaviest fractions of the domestic waste stream and the easiest to compost/recycle, one has to wonder why councils wouldn’t want as much garden waste as possible to help them meet their waste diversion and recycling targets?

There is an argument,however, that councils could be doing more to track down those who fly-tip. People often leave paperwork that can be used to trace dumped rubbish and while the defence is often “somebody must have stolen a bag of rubbish from my house then dumped it” there’s nothing to stop councils using social media sites to post names and addresses found in bags of dumped rubbish.

And as Trading Standards staff have to spend a lot of their time trawling adverts and websites looking for infringements, what’s to stop them from compiling lists of “man and van services” operators and cross-checking with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), which registers all waste contractors)? Better still, why not simply phone these people and ask where they dump their rubbish and if they are registered waste carriers?

And there’s more: Kirsty and Phil usually tell viewers to “ensure that your builder has good credentials and references before you hire them”. So it would help if they also said “and ask your builder for the name of the registered waste carrier who’ll be taking away all the debris from your improvements. If they can’t tell you, and then fly-tip it, you could be fined as well.”

John Crawford worked in the Scottish waste industry for several decades