Satellites to hunt for illegal landfill sites
Environment agency steps up fight on waste crime
ENVIRONMENT chiefs are to deploy satellite surveillance in a crackdown on illegal landfill sites operated by organised criminals.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) plans to pinpoint unlicensed dumps from space as it intensifies its battle against the growing menace of waste crime.
The agency will use images captured by the European Space Agency’s sentinel satellites to scour the country for signs of illegal landfills, which can cost up to half a million pounds each to clean up.
Officials at Sepa say waste crime, including illegal landfills and unlicensed recycling, is draining the UK economy of at least £500million a year in enforcement and clean-up costs.
The agency has tendered a contract for a company who can provide it with ‘remote sensing’ services to track waste criminals with satellites and aeroplanes.
Sepa believes remote sensing, usually used to gather military intelligence, can be ‘adapted for use’ in the war on waste crime.
The contract will see specialists provide images taken from satellites and planes to pinpoint areas of land disturbance consistent with unlicensed dumps.
Over the next year, they will also provide chemical signature and radiation readings from suspected sites ‘to identify where illegal stockpiling, land application landfilling has taken place’.
The move comes a week after residents in Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, were blighted by swarms of flies emanating from an illegal dump at a derelict bleach works.
In 2013, taxpayers were left with a £500,000 clean-up bill after an illegal landfill in Castlemilk, Glasgow, was abandoned.
George Hope, unit manager for Sepa’s life smart waste project, said: ‘Waste crime often remains hidden until its impact, the illegal waste site, the warehouse that has burned down and found to be full of waste, the farmer’s field full of waste, is discovered.
‘It’s also a crime that can involve organised crime groups. This is why we need to constantly innovate. We need to raise the chance of detection and robust enforcement, as well as using technology to help us better understand how waste crime emerges and operates.
‘Remote sensing is a dynamic field and, for this reason, we are exploring its applications and how it could be used by regulatory agencies like Sepa. That could mean use, of course, of planes and satellites.’
Three years ago, police chiefs and Sepa officials told Holyrood’s justice committee organised crime gangs were profiting from illegal waste disposal, using violence and intimidation to secure lucrative waste disposal contracts.
‘Waste crime often remains hidden’