Maybe they will never find him for that very reason

No. The ones sifting through crap looking for him will not deliberately fail in order to protect the ones at the top. Proper cops minds don’t work that way.

When the bin lorry story came to light as a reasonable possibility … did they continue to let the landfill site be used in the area that the lorry dumped its stuff, or did they ask the site to leave that area, and move onto other areas of the site to fill in. (That way greatly narrowing your search area should you need to search it later … as is the case now).

I wonder if the bin lorry contract with the landfill site is charged by weight ?

Most likely. Most sites I drove tipper lorries onto would weigh you in and out to calculate tonnage. Bin lorries at my local landfill site are weighed in and out as well.

that being said, if its a council site and council lorries, it may just be a case of recording how much rubbish is being put into the ground.

I wonder if the bin lorry contract with the landfill site is charged by weight ?

according to the beeb the answer is no, it was per delivery

At the time when all this was in the press I was surprised that a vehicle which is designed to collect multiple tonnes of junk, has no reason to be accurately calibrated, and is probably cleaned rarely would be able to measure its load to within a tenth of a percent.

At the time when all this was in the press I was surprised that a vehicle which is designed to collect multiple tonnes of junk, has no reason to be accurately calibrated, and is probably cleaned rarely would be able to measure its load to within a tenth of a percent.

…and yet clearly some people who knew thought it did and had total confidence in it.

…and yet in spite of that confidence there was a reason why it was still wrong, but the wrongness was able to be precisely identified months later.

Beyond me, and I can’t wait to hear the full detail of exactly how the weight was assessed/reassessed, if it’s ever released.

Well … I never drove any tipper which had load guages, but i did get loaded by the front loading scoops at quarries and the like. If I asked for 20ton, then the operator would typically load up a scoop, hold it still and record the weight before putting it in. Then on the last scoop (typically the 3rd scoop) , they would adjust what was in the scoop by very very little amounts to get the total correct. The amount shoogled off the bucket could be as little as a few spade fulls. So for a single bucket load of about 7tons, shoogling off a few kgs must mean the scales are quite precise in their measurements.

That was 9 years ago, so based on that, in theory, no reason to suspect that the lorry couldn’t be as accurate as is being reported.

^^ interesting. As above weighing in and out is the way to accurately guage what’s been dumped.

Landfill tax is charged per tonne on top of normal landfill fees which can be by skip or lorry load. Not sure how it works if one is measured by weight and one by volume.

shoogling

Good word. Added to my vocabulary – thanks!