A man has been fined for illegally transporting waste soil, and the haulage company from which he hired trucks to move it, has also been convicted and fined.
Sam Dowell, 30, was fined £1,840 at Cambridge Magistrates’ Court last year for causing the transportation and dumping of waste soil without the appropriate permits.
Dowell, who pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing, also had to pay £2,000 compensation. He also had to pay a third of the cost of removing the illegally dumped soil, plus costs of £1,900.
Patrick Coleman, 75, of Galsworthy Road, Barnet, North London, who is the sole director of haulage company PJC Sweepers Ltd, which rented the trucks to Dowell. Coleman was acquitted at Cambridgeshire Crown Court on June 1, 2022 for transporting waste without a permit.
However, his company was fined £6,000 plus costs of £10,000, a further £4,000 compensation for the remediation of the site. He also had to pay a £170 victim surcharge at the same court on July 4, 2022.
Dowell had been given a contract to help prepare a piece of land in readiness for the groundworks of a housing development in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire.
His employees carried out the work while he identified a site next to the Royston Sewage Treatment Works in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, for dumping the waste soil. Dowell leased lorries from PJC Sweepers Ltd to move it.
However, this site is owned by AWG Land Holdings Ltd, part of the Anglian Water Group.
Anglian Water Group includes Anglian Water Services Ltd, and did not have an environmental permit to accept waste.
Coleman’s haulage company should have carried out duty of care checks to ensure the waste soil was being moved to an appropriately licensed waste site.
His Honour Judge Cooper observed that despite the drivers being challenged by a representative of the landowner to inform that the deposits were not authorised, they carried on regardless until the police were called.
By then around 30 lorry loads of deposits had already been made.
Describing the actions of PJC Sweepers Ltd as “completely reckless”, he added:
“Anyone who puts profits before the protection of the environment needs to understand that they face a serious sentence.
“Duty of care cannot be delegated to another company. There is a duty to check how the next waste holder in the chain will handle the waste and where the wastes journey will end.
“The failure by the company’s employees to make these checks – which would have revealed that the receiving site was not a permitted site.
“This meant that the deposits of waste soil made on or before January 14, 2019 were illegal.”
