The first thing they should do is to make the council, EPA and/or government responsible for the cost of cleaning it up. At the moment if someone dumps waste then the landowner is responsible for cleaning it up and the EPA will suddenly find the resources to hassle them to get on with it. The costs can be bankrupting for the landowner. If the authorities were responsible for cleaning it up it would give them an incentive and a genuine cost/benefit case to invest in better enforcement.

One day I noticed a load of old truck tires had been dumped in a stream which was the official border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. I phoned the Notts authority, "not their problem, contact Derby." So I phoned Derby's authority. "Not our problem, contact Notts."

The tires are probably still there, several years on, slowly degrading and polluting the stream.

Get a group together and put half on each side?

Informing them separately gives them the chance to do this. Assuming you've got a paper trail forward it all to thel ocal papers.

Email the CEOs (or equivalent of both in the same email showing both addresses suggesting they sort it out between themselves. If you still get finger pointing emails forward the whole thread to the local papers.

@Headley_Grange

>make the council, EPA and/or government responsible for the cost of cleaning it up

Nooooo! That'd just be an invitation for scumbags everywhere to buy a field, dump 1000's ton of rubbish in it, then call the authorities and say they don't know who did it and expect the authorities to clean it all up.

Crooks won't spend buckets of money creating a paper trail which leads back to them if they can just victimize an innocent landowner instead.

If government makes it policy to protect and help innocent landowners who report illegal dumping promptly, then those landowners have incentive to put up cameras and catch the dumpers. Cameras are cheap. Live-piloted drones are expensive.

The problem won't be solved without more eyes looking out for the countryside. Better those cameras be run by landowners than Big Brother finding another excuse for surveillance drones buzzing overhead.

Trail cameras would be my solution but by the council. The council or police would find it hard to initiate a prosecution from the landowner's cameras and the only alternative would be for the landowner to go to the expense of suing, hoping to recover the cost of clean up but risking getting no return.

If the local council wants to place and operate them, even better. I suspect many landowners would welcome the help and be eager to do their part, just so long as they don't get hit with the bill for cleanup. Wouldn't even take that many. Most properties can be unmonitored but even a few cams make illegal disposal into an unsustainable business model.

If cooperation in stopping the problem relieves the landowner of liability, then the government will find itself with a lot more allies. Otherwise, what is a victimized landowner to do? Pay a big, fat bill, or perhaps just hire a cut-rate crook to haul the rubbish away, tip it somewhere else, and make it someone else's problem?

They first tried using AI to analyse satellite footage but unfortunately it tagged most of Birmingham as an illegal dump.*

*When of course it should have tagged it a dump full of illegals...

Councils make rubbish disposal difficult and then they act surprised people choose the path of least resistance.

Not excusing the fly-tippers. Just make it easy to dispose of rubbish instead of filling the pockets of foreign tax avoiding corporations who make drones and other mumbo jumbo.

We were moving house within six weeks and had an old king size mattress to dispose of. The local council bulk collections dept said the earliest they could pick it up would be four months hence! Don't think our house buyer or the council would have liked it left on the kerb outside the house for that length of time. Struggled to find anyone to take it away. No wonder there is so much illegal dumping when they make it so hard to get rid of stuff legitimately.

I spent 20 mins with a knife, pliers and a small bolt cutter to turn a large mattress into smaller bits that I took to the tip in my car.

Job done.

I would have done similar at one time of the day, unfortunately my heart is knackered, so can't tackle most of the DIY jobs I would once have taken in my stride.

Not every one is able bodied and it's easier to slip a tenner to someone to "take care of it".

It wasn't even possible for us to hire a man with a van to take it to the local tip, as the tip don't allow vans there, only domestic vehicles. So any such man with a van offers would undoubtedly have been to illegally dump it. In the end a relative with a large people-carrier took it away for us to a tip near their home, thirty miles away! Councils are going out of their way to encourage illegal dumping.

Councils make rubbish disposal difficult and then they act surprised people choose the path of least resistance.

Most of the waste in question is business waste, and its not difficult at all to find private contractors to take that away (even if the council are willing to collect it, it's still chargeable for business waste).

Unfortunately, because landfill tax is £130 a tonne some of these contractors are either charging the landfill tax and keeping it, or splitting the "saving" with the business. The more traditional itinerants who do small domestic jobs and fly tip the waste aren't a significant part of this "huge illegal tips" problem, although they are also a tax evading nuisance.

So the problem here is that the policy morons of Defra have intentionally made it really expensive to legally dispose of business waste, because in their vacant little brains businesses have control over how much waste they generate. They've given inadequate thought to the consequences of this, and here we are. And with government's customary stupidity they've doubled the much lower "inert materials" landfill tax. Whilst that's "only" now £8.65 a tonne, this becomes a big burden on things like civil engineering, further compounding the already ludicrous costs to build anything in Britain.

It's all part of the policy of both Labour and Tories over the past twenty years, of taxing their way to prosperity.

This inert landfill waste from my bridge building project, your honour? Surely you have been misinformed. That's clearly my public garden project!

On TV recently, they showed a massive (organised crime) illegal dump that had been filling up for over a year, and during all this time the environment agency were aware of the situation but failed to act in a decisive manner, instead doing more "investigations" and progressing the matter through legal avenues. In short, they did sod all to stop it. Can't understand why the cops didn't just arrest the truck drivers going there on a daily basis and charge them and shut down the site straight away. There is "due process" and "doing feck all".

Drone footage is useless unless it is acted upon. The environment agency already knows were most of these illegal dumps are, local residents are quick to report them. This just sounds like a gimmick or more toys for the boys.

>On TV recently

Suspect you're thinking of [1]this 13 min C4 news film broadcast couple of months ago.

When watching it do note the caravans / mobile homes and the ponies and there's your clue as to what sort of scumbag it is that's running the two dumps in the film and many/most of the similar illegal dumps up and down the country.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNh782589uw

Make any vehicle used to dump illegal waste subject to seizure and the problem will soon disappear!

>Make any vehicle used to dump illegal waste subject to seizure

Already can. Became law thirty years ago.

Having the powers means nothing if they don't use them. If they actually did this it would stop the problem. A company or owner-operator who has his 32 tonne 8x4 Scania tipper seized by the authorities will learn quickly, and word will get around amongst drivers.

"I hear Connor's had to walk home again, second time for him. Fuck knows who'll employ the eejit now".

Which begs the question, Why isn't this happening? They'd shut down all these illegal dumps overnight if all the scumbags trucks were seized.

One small problem, there's no shortage of trucks..

There soon would be and drivers would be less interested in such work if they knew they would end up with a stint at his majesties pleasure and heavy fines. There would just need to be a concerted effort by law enforcement to crush the problem instead of ignoring it.

There's a sortage of free trucks. Stealing somebody else's wouldn't be a good solution to being stopped either. It would just lead to jail time.

Meanwhile Kirklees, in their infinite wisdom, are shutting the skip sites several days a week.

There was a case reported recently where paperwork was dumped. Addresses were traced and it turned out householders some distance away had put it in their recycling bins so it was the council, via their contractors, who contrived to enter it into the fly-tipping chain.