04 March 2005
Councils are spending £100 a minute clearing away rubbish dumped illegally on roadsides, in car parks or across country paths.
New statistics from Flycapture, the national fly-tipping database created last year, revealed that rubbish is dumped somewhere in England every 35 seconds.
The database has helped to create a comprehensive national picture of the fly-tipping menace so that resources can be targeted at problem areas.
Flycapture showed that, between July and December last year, almost 28,000 fridges, freezers and washing machines were dumped.
The most common fly-tip is a black bag of household rubbish left at a roadside.
Environment minister Elliot Morley said fly-tipping was a serious environmental crime that would not be tolerated.
'Almost 250,000 black bags are left somewhere they shouldn't be every year, and each one costs £40 to clear away. That's about £10m that local authorities could be spending on preventing fly-tipping and improving their neighbourhoods in general,' he said.
Barbara Young, chief executive of the Environment Agency, added that every day there were 40 incidents of lorry-loads of waste being illegally dumped.
'However, Flycapture is not simply a database for keeping records, it is an enforcement tool that already is helping us and local authorities to target and catch these criminals,' she said.
PFmar2005
