The company in Walthamstow, east London, was acquitted of breaching environmental protection laws by a jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court. Judge Alex Milne QC had called for an outbreak of “common sense” after he was told that the council had run up £15,000 in legal costs over the box. Giving directions to the jury, the judge said: “This company is charged with failing to take reasonable measures to ensure that the transfer of controlled waste from its premises was only to an authorised person. The first question is therefore were the cardboard boxes in question waste?
“Packaging such as boxes received by a company like Electrosigns is not waste when it is delivered to the company. Nor do boxes become waste as soon as the contents are removed. If a company chooses to keep and re-use boxes, they remain the property of the company and an asset. If the company keeps boxes for its own use but then chooses to give or sell boxes to another party that is not discarding them,” the judge said. Following the acquittal, Judge Milne said the case had been “a monumental waste of public time and money”.
After the hearing Mrs Bracey criticised the council’s spending on the case. She said a successful prosecution could have led to supermarkets and other businesses being banned from giving customers boxes for their own use. Clyde Loakes, a councillor at Waltham Forest, said the verdict was disappointing. He said rubbish would continue to be dumped on street corners if businesses did not ensure that their waste was transferred to a licensed contractor.
1 comment:
The company I work for uses a skip firm to take away its waste. However, we separate out copper, brass, aluminium, storing it until there's a van or trailer-load, which we take to the scrap metals merchant, and exchange it for several hundred pounds worth of cash.
So, I'm on my way to the scrap merchant, and a police car stops me, asking where I'm going. I tell him, and he asks to see my waste transfer licence.
I tell him it's at our office, but not relevant. Why not, he asks, agressively. Because this is not waste, it's valuable raw material for manufacturing industry.
He threatened to arrest me for my response.
But the point is perfectly valid. Those waste disposal rules are there to discourage fly-tipping and environmentally unsound behaviour. Old copper pipe and cable is a valuable resource, not waste. The energy used to recycle metals is a fraction of that used to mine and process ores to produce the same weight in ingots.
Re-use, as in the example of cardboard boxes, is the best form of recycling, but reprocessing used materials is the next best.
In neither case are those materials waste, trash, rubbish.
The disappointed councillor and the prosecutors are idiots.
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