I guess that fly tipping is a pretty big problem the whole country over and I see it often down on the Somerset Levels. However, this little snippet from our local BBC News site is pretty grim. I hope that they catch them sharpish and lock them up.
Not just a total disregard for the environment, but also a total disregard for people's health.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e29plwlnzo
A dodgy property developer is renovating the house next door to me. We are detached from it with a small area of pavement between the properties that the neighbour owns some of. They had a skip on this land.
Easter Sunday, my wife is in bed not feeling very well. There is a loud thumping against our gable wall, then somebody smacks the skip with a hammer, rings like a giant bell.
I go out to ask them to keep the noise down. Get a load of arsyness in response.
Then I realise what they are actually doing - they have a pile of asbestos flu pipes piled up against my building and they are smashing them to bits in public and stuffing them into plastic bin bags and then into their car boot.
Obviously I report them to environmental health at the council, who couldn't be less interested. They log an out of hours working complaint and tell me to report asbestos to the health and safety executive. They need photographic evidence. Too late for that.
So these scroates have obviously driven off and fly tipped it somewhere, and the local authority didn't give a sh!t.
and the local authority didn't give a sh!t.
Underfunded, understaffed and unglamorous work. They're so overwhelmed by the scale of it that they don't even know where to begin and even if they do succeed in bringing a case to court it's invariably a warning or a small fine. Since a lot of it is organised crime, they're always 5 steps ahead of any council which only adds to the sense of despair within authorities that they're outgunned and outmatched at every turn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50660138
A school near my Mum routinely has a line of coaches outside, all idling their engines for an hour. Multiple complaints to the school, the coach company and to the council. A council official turned up one day and said "oh it's OK, the pollution blows away from the school". Could not have been less interested. That's the pervading attitude across many authorities.
I was out on the gravel bike the other day and someone had fly tipped a boat on a dead end country lane. An actual boat. I'll find a pic.
Is that a Bullseye prize?
I'm sure there was a recent illegal dump where responsibility for cleaning it up lay with the local council, but the cost of the clean up was multiple times the councils entire annual budget.
It's so cheap to dump stuff and so cripplingly expensive to then tidy up afterwards that councils have no chance. The EA and Police don't come off looking good in some of the high profile cases either, there's usually a timeline of:
- Locals notice dozens of rubbish laden HGVs driving through their village and coming back empty
- They realise there's an illegal dump and report it to council/police/EA
- Police: "That's a civil matter sir". Council: "That's for the EA". EA: "You need to report to the police"
- Repeat for 6 months
- Eventually the MP gets involved and someone gets an order banning the (already illegal!?) dumping
- Dumping continues
- Police/EA act after another 6 months of dumping by writing a letter reminding the land owner of the court order
- Dumping continues
- Site is now entirely full of waste and dumpers move on
- Police and EA say the dumping stopping shows their strong action in the form of court orders is working
- Council is left to go bankrupt trying to clear it up while locals have their children chased by giant rats and swarmed by flies.
I was out on the gravel bike the other day and someone had fly tipped a boat on a dead end country lane. An actual boat. I'll find a pic.
That’s impressive, much more so that the usual builders waste I find dumped on my travels.
I’ve just had to report another load of fly-tipped rubbish on The Ridgeway close to us.
I’m starting to worry that the guy at the council who replies to all these fly-tipping reports will start to think it’s me dumping this shit as I seem to be sending these report forms to him so often 🤣
I was out on the gravel bike the other day and someone had fly tipped a boat on a dead end country lane. An actual boat. I'll find a pic.
That’s impressive, much more so that the usual builders waste I find dumped on my travels.
I’ve just had to report another load of fly-tipped rubbish on The Ridgeway close to us.
I’m starting to worry that the guy at the council who replies to all these fly-tipping reports will start to think it’s me dumping this shit as I seem to be sending these report forms to him so often 🤣
It's lucky you don't use your real name...
Part of the problem with York where I am is the lack of tips/"recycling centres". Theres 1 in York and understandably its always absolutely rammed so they've employed a booking system now which might speed things up a bit once you're there but makes the whole thing more difficult leading to people with a certain mind(less)set thinking "ah its easier to just dump my crap in the countryside.
The infuriating thing is that where I saw that boat, it looked like its basically an illegal tip. Car wheels/tyres all over the place, bags of rubbish, timber, garden waste and a fkn boat. The nearest tip to there is 1.3 miles away. Staggering how utterly scummy people are. Fly tipping is the lowest of the low in my book...
See it everywhere. Atrocious.
I think maybe it should be free for business waste at the centres. At least then we might get less of it happening at such huge costs.
The problem then is that I can set up a "waste disposal" company where I just pick up waste and drive it straight to the council tip and leave them with the costs of handling it, while I make the profit.
The problem then is that I can set up a "waste disposal" company where I just pick up waste and drive it straight to the council tip and leave them with the costs of handling it, while I make the profit.
It is a problem, yes, but it is also a solution. Surely it is more cost-effective for the council to dispose of correctly sorted waste and recycling, than it is to clean up huge illegal dumps?
For real. It's got to be cheaper to handle waste bought to the site on vans/Lutons than it is to handle mass fly tipping.
The problem then is that I can set up a "waste disposal" company where I just pick up waste and drive it straight to the council tip and leave them with the costs of handling it, while I make the profit.
It is a problem, yes, but it is also a solution. Surely it is more cost-effective for the council to dispose of correctly sorted waste and recycling, than it is to clean up huge illegal dumps?
Exactly that. The way you'll cut down on people driving into the countryside to dump crap is to make it easier for them to drive to a tip to dump their crap. If that means making it free, so be it - its still cheaper than the council manning a fly tipping phoneline, driving out to pick it all up, driving it back to the same tip I assume the flytipper could be using and dumping it there.
I guess that fly tipping is a pretty big problem the whole country over and I see it often down on the Somerset Levels. However, this little snippet from our local BBC News site is pretty grim. I hope that they catch them sharpish and lock them up.
Not just a total disregard for the environment, but also a total disregard for people's health.
As one of the STW Spanish correspondents, it’s not just your country, we’ve got the same issue.
When I was having my chicken shed refurbed the local council were all over it because of the asbestos roof and i had to wait months for a specialist asbestos company to remove it and issue all sorts of paperwork to prove that it had been disposed of correctly and in a traceable manner.
Some one else just dumped 3 big asbestos tanks in a side street but normally you’ll find a load of building waste just dumped in ramblas.
As one of the STW Spanish correspondents, it’s not just your country, we’ve got the same issue.
I always thought Spain was quite neat and tidy but when I was in Málaga a while ago, the city was immaculate but then riding out through some of the suburbs, especially to the west, it was an absolute shit-tip. Building rubble, car tyres, all sorts of crap.
Making it free is never going to work.
1) where do you draw the line? A van? Van with trailer, 7.5T tipper? What about those 4 axle rubble trucks driven like rally cars? I could see some large, but shady demolition contractors just sending truck after truck to the local council depot to ditch hundreds of tons of waste on the council because they can.
2) there’s always a cost somewhere. Our tips aren’t run by the council, it’s a contractor - veolia here. They’re going to charge the council for commercial waste, so we end up paying for it in our council tax. I’d rather we spent the money catching and (properly) punishing the flytippers and making it impossible and unrewarding to do so in the future. Domestic waste we pay for through our council tax. Anything commercial should be paid for by the contractor who bills his client, not all of us.
3)the scale of the big fly tipping sites is stupendous. Where is this all coming from? It feels like it’s a small city’s worth of waste and transportation on that kind of scale must surely be easy to trace? There must be a whole fleet of vehicles on the road doing back to back shuttle runs. It feels like there must be corruption at fairly high level to source that much junk in the first place?
4) even if councils do start taking commercial waste, the tip is only going to be open during work hours, no hazardous material, it’s going to need to be sorted appropriately etc. Compared to stopping in a lay-by, tying the dumpy bag in the back of your van to the fencepost and just driving off, it’s still more work… You’ll also be making yourself more visible and if your van is at the tip every day, obviously busy, but the company isn’t declaring all those cash in hand jobs, hmrc is going to prick up its ears too!
the real solution is to de-dickhead the place, but that’s true of most of the worlds problems. It is one of those things that absolutely boils my piss, and while I’m not a fan of capital punishment, I’d happily bury flytippers in their own landfill.
Some scrote builder regularly fly tips on my local green lane. Poor farmer clears it up as he can't get through with anything but a tractor.
Always the same spot, always same sort of rubbish. It will carry on till someone catches perpetrator.
Side note, I litter pick the nearby road. Always cheap alcohol, vapes, cheap takeaways etc. only redeeming feature is diabetes will get the perp soonish.
A whole mobile home stacked full of crap was dumped in the middle of the road not far from us, council had put out road closed signs but being en velo I usually ignore & see if it's properly closed, easy to cycle past & a vehicle passing place had been carved through the grass verge, the drag lines down the road showed where it had come from but no way of finding out who the perpetrators were 🤬
A huge pile of fly-tipped building waste appeared on the lane near me. My neighbour recognised it as their waste which they'd paid to have taken away, but is unable to report the builder responsible because in the eyes of the law they're the ones who'll be prosecuted (and NYCC will because it's easy).
Law needs rewriting from the ground up on this. I can't believe all they've proposed is adding points to driving licences. I'd start with snipers on rooftops and go from there. People who fly-tip have already demonstrated that they aren't needed in society.
Surely it is more cost-effective for the council to dispose of correctly sorted waste and recycling, than it is to clean up huge illegal dumps?
Surely it'd be more cost effective for them to clean it up six months ago when it was a small illegal dump.
As one of the STW Spanish correspondents, it’s not just your country, we’ve got the same issue.
I always thought Spain was quite neat and tidy but when I was in Málaga a while ago, the city was immaculate but then riding out through some of the suburbs, especially to the west, it was an absolute shit-tip. Building rubble, car tyres, all sorts of crap.
The city will get the love as that where the money is,the outskirts tend to be less looked after.
There’ll be a moan and outrage and then they’ll get round to tidying it up.
Sometimes it’s half built house estates with ocupas , it’s tricky to remove them so councils not going to clean up their mess until they’ve gone.
TBH for all the beach pics I’ve posted, I could probably match them with the toilets dumped in the middle of nowhere’ ish.
My neighbour recognised it as their waste which they'd paid to have taken away, but is unable to report the builder responsible because in the eyes of the law they're the ones who'll be prosecuted (and NYCC will because it's easy).
Law needs rewriting from the ground up on this.
really? even if you have the paperwork from the builders saying they'd removed the waste legally?!
Similar, We've just come back from Malta . Boat trip around some stunning sea caves and the rubbish that was floating around clearly the same disposable cups etc provided by the boat . 🤬🤬🤬
I'd start with snipers on rooftops and go from there. People who fly-tip have already demonstrated that they aren't needed in society.
This!
There used to be a massive pile of flytipping out the back of Sherwood Pines, it was there for years. The council put in boulders and barriers to try to prevent more being added and all it did was move the dumping location a few metres further along. Full on industrial levels of waste, big fridges and washing machines. The kind of thing where some fairly hefty trucks are needed. How is it not practical / possible to stake the place out, put up cameras etc and catch the perpetrators and then shoot them arrest them and seize the vehicles?
It was an eye watering cost to clean it all up; needed multiple trucks, hazardous waste disposal teams, pest control, the forestry people...
The city will get the love as that where the money is,the outskirts tend to be less looked after.
I remember the same in Greece actually - nicely painted seaside house and then the tins of paint and building rubble dumped over cliffs onto the rocks below.
