Tyneside firm ordered to pay £14,400 over odour emissions
A Tyneside business has been ordered to pay more than £14,400 after it allowed excessive odours to escape from a waste facility.
Impetus Waste Management Ltd, which operates a waste transfer warehouse at Davy Bank, Wallsend, admitted two charges before North Tyneside Magistrates' yesterday (18 September).
The company was fined £9,990 and ordered to pay £4,311.33 costs, with a victim surcharge of £100.
The firm was brought to court by the Environment Agency, following two incidents of strong smells.
Nigel Augustin, prosecuting for the Environment Agency, told the court that investigating officers visited the site in August last year, following complaints of odours from nearby residents.
They noted that the odour was escaping from a building in which general waste was stored. The facility’s doors were open, allowing the smells to escape. It also appeared that no odour suppression systems were in operation around one of the doors.
Odour complaints were also received in January this year. An officer visited the site on three occasions to carry out ‘sniff tests’, and he concluded that the odour present would cause serious detriment to the amenity of the locality outside the site boundary.
In mitigation, the company said that the facility’s doors had been open in August last year to allow vehicles in and out of the building. Impetus also said that odour suppression equipment near one of the doors had been switched off so that new machinery could be installed.
The company added that, in January, a build-up of waste following a busy Christmas period took longer to remove because the firm had been let down by its usual haulier.
Sophie Webster, Environment Management Team Leader at the Environment Agency, said: “We hope today’s sentence demonstrates the importance of environmental compliance. Waste sites such as this can have a detrimental impact on local communities if they are not managed according to the conditions of their environmental permits.
“In this case, the smells which came from the facility were strong enough to affect residents living more than a hundred metres from the site boundary.
“Although this legal case has now concluded, the Environment Agency is continuing to work with Impetus to drive further improvements at this site.”
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