UK company fined £100k for exceeding waste tire storage limit

London – A UK company has been fined £100,000 and ordered to pay costs of £7,463 for exceeding the legal amount of waste tire dumping on a Northamptonshire site.

In an announced 11 July, the Environmental Agency said Exhaust Tyres and Batteries (Worcester) Ltd deposited around 250,000 end-of-life tires (ELTs) at the site of Synergy Tyres Ltd in Daventry.

While allowed to store waste and mechanically treat ELTs, the Synergy Tyres site did not have an environmental permit to store large numbers of tires.

Agency officers discovered that the company had deposited “regularly deposited tires unlawfully” at the site “without checking that the site was authorised to accept those tires.”

The “illegal activity”, said the agency, happened between January 2020 until late February 2021.

Exhaust Tyres and Batteries maintained that it was unaware the environmental law obligations.

The ruling shows that “we will not hesitate to prosecute companies which endanger communities and disregard the environment and the law,” said Paul Salter of the Environment Agency.

“As the largest contributor of waste tires to the Synergy site, the defendant had been reckless,” said the, senior environmental crime officer.

The company’s actions displayed “an alarming lack of knowledge and environmental awareness”, Salter went on to say.

“There is an inherent fire risk when tires are stored in such large quantities, which poses significant risks to nearby residents and premises,” he concluded.