If you live in Allt-yr-yn, Pill, Tredegar Park, St Julians or anywhere else in Newport - or pretty much anywhere else in Cymru / Wales you will know that fly tipping is a significant problem.
Household rubbish and waste is being dumped on our streets, our nature reserves, in fields on the Gwent levels (in the drainage reens which aggravates drainage problems and flooding), on our mountains and in our national parks.
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| Fly tipped fridge freezer and chill cabinet |
More Locally Newport City Council is directly responsible for removing dumped items from any council owned land, including housing estates, grass areas, parks and reens, canals and public highways.
It remains one of those anti-social problems that plagues all of our communities across all of Cymru / Wales affecting both relatively well off and less affluent communities of our country and our city.
Fly-tipping affects both rural and urban areas equally and despite the best efforts of financially strapped county councils shows little sign of being discouraged or curbed.
Local fly-tipping regularly costs Newport council over £100,000 a year to clean up (South Wales Argus). In 2019 clean up costs were £117,452.
Based on observational evidence and stories in the media, 2020 is going to cost great deal more - judging by the rubbish (including domestic and commercial waste) that has been dumped in and around Newport in the last few months (across Cymru / Wales fly-tipping has increased by 88% since Lockdown started.
The South Wales Argus (back in July 21015) reported that there were more than 7,000 fly-tipping reports but only five prosecutions in the last four years in Newport, a Freedom of Information request showed.
No-one was taken to court in the city between April 2011 and March 2014 and the five offenders the council prosecuted in 2014-2015 were handed fines totalling just £2,600, the Argus reported.
It was noted in 2015 that fly-tipping costs Newport council tax payers £300,000 a year.
Fly-tipping in Newport by and large fell in the four years between 2010 and 2014, with 2,014 reports in 2011-12, 1,982 in 2012-13, 1,578 in 2013-14 and 1,672 in 2014-15, totalling 7,246, the Freedom of Information request showed.
In February 2017 the South Wales Argus reported that 135.8 tonnes of waste was picked up by the Pride in Newport team since it was launched.
Newport council (and other local authorities) have no doubt mostly done their best it can to resolve the problem, made worse recently by the close of local tips during lockdown.
Some local authorities operate a "zero tolerance approach" to fly-tipping, and regularly hand out dozens of fines and fixed-penalty notices to offenders - others don’t.
One problem is that the sums raised through through fines pale into insignificance when compared with the large costs involved in clearing up illegally-dumped waste.
Much of this activity is worthwhile, but, it’s reactive and after the fact, with the waste dumped.
The Welsh Government’s on-going campaign urges everyone to use their duty of care and ensure all waste is disposed of legally by a registered waste carrier and to report any fly-tipping to their local authority. A list of registered waste carriers is also provided on the Natural Resources Wales website.
It’s clear we cannot go on as we are. We need to a lot more creative to fix this problem.
Household waste makes up 70% of tipped waste - with the remainder being commercial / industrial waste – something that may well be aggravated by the charge that commercial concerns face at some refuse sites (including Newport).
For a start we need to produce less waste to start with, eliminating or reducing packaging would also help.
Part of the problem is lack of systematic approach to enforcement - some councils are very active, others, to be generous are less focussed on the problem - that needs to change.
What’s needed is to develop a realistic and sustained all agency approach, which can initially reduce and then bring an end to the problem of fly tipping – one step in the right direction would involve accepting commercial (but not industrial) waste at the tip for no fee - and greater enforcement across all our local authorities.
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