Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-101)

14 OCTOBER 2004

MR MIKE WALKER AND MR PER-ANDERS HJORT

  Q100 Mr Thomas: What in your experience is happening to that waste? Is it tipped, dumped, illegally, or is it being taken and put in landfill or disposal sites and are the owners and operators of those sites also being rather loose, shall we say, with the regulations?

  Mr Hjort: I do not know, to be honest. A lot of sorting is going on in different places under conditions which a company like ours would not allow people to work. There are probably many operations like that going on. The working conditions in some places are conditions we would not work under. I cannot say where illegal dumping is taking place, because frankly I have not seen any illegal dumping with my own eyes.

  Sue Doughty: It has been suggested to me that it is being mixed in with non-hazardous waste and getting into landfill. Do you have any comment to make about that?

  Mr Walker: The National Hazardous Waste Forum discussed this earlier in the week and around the table nobody really knew where it was going. The Agency said that it was going to be looking at hazardous waste landfill sites in the next few months to try to get a better handle on what has happened to hazardous waste since July.

  Q101 Sue Doughty: In this context, there was a query about whether in fact there had been an increase in disposal of hazardous waste before co-disposal ended which would mean that people had been front-loading their activities. Is that still a possibility or are we still saying that there is a considerable gap in the amount of hazardous waste we would have expected to be disposed of now which cannot be explained away by any other means?

  Mr Walker: Before July, there was certainly increased hazardous waste landfilled, contaminated soil particularly, which is the largest component of hazardous waste by weight and volume. It was obvious that construction sites were being cleared in advance of the regulations and the waste was being co-disposed. That will account for some of the drop in hazardous waste produced since then. Nevertheless, there is concern that there is other hazardous waste which is falling out of the regulatory system in one way or another.

  Chairman: Thank you very much; that has been extremely interesting. Thank you Mr Walker and thank you Mr Hjort, we appreciate that you are an extremely busy man and we are grateful to you for your time. This is a little underhand, but since the representatives of the Environment Agency are still in the room and as we have another five minutes, it would be extremely helpful if you would not mind coming back and talking about this issue of hazardous waste and the missing waste which has just been raised by ESA.





 
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