Series 1 - Bonus Episode: Recycling Corrupted

Pipsy podcast on suurin jälkeen. We're Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, two investigative journalists. It's been two years since we exposed how criminal gangs are making money from our waste in our BBC Radio 4 series "Berry'd". Since then, we've been inundated with leads and information. We know criminals are on the rise, but what about our councils and authorities? How much are they to blame? From BBC Radio 4, this is "Berry'd", recycling corrupted. In a quarter of a mile, at the roundabout, take the first exit onto Abakorn Road. Let's go back all the way to the worst bit of this story and where we started. It's a place called "Maboy" near London, Derry, in Northern Ireland. We're driving past this again and we almost feel nostalgic. It's so beautiful in the sunlight. Yeah, it feels just like last time we were here. There are bright green farm fields around us. You'd never guess more than a million tons of illegal waste sits just under the surface. "Maboy" represents the total collapse of the system. For years, councils sent Erie Cycling to a company that secretly and illegally buried it here, poisoning an area of special scientific interest and threatening the water supply to Derry. Two men pleaded guilty. We thought we were coming back for their sentencing, but yet again, it's been delayed. I had convinced myself that we would have a sentencing by now. I don't know why. I always have faith that it's going to happen. I just can't believe it. It's just so depressing that something so obviously wrong with the system, with what they've done to the environment, to the community, and you can just be left waiting like this. Yeah, I mean it's two years since it's been a guilty. It's just crazy. Yeah. It can take that long. So instead, we're heading into Derry. The wide still shine of the foil river opens up before us as we drop into the city, crossing over into an area called the bogside. That's the iconic view isn't it? Look at the murals, the spire, all the terraced houses with the flowers outside the front, the flags flying. Yeah, that says. That says welcome to Derry to meet. Is that the entrance? Thanks. We're meeting up with activists who fear a cover-up has happened. Fighting. Hello, hi. Hi, I'm here. We've met a lot of them before from our work reporting here, and it feels strangely apt to be meeting in a grassroots community centre with its murals and knitting clubs and good value T. The type of place where the real cost of things is felt. We walk away from the noise of the foyer and find ourselves in an empty sports hall. My name's Sean Harkin. I'm a counsellor for people before profit in the Derry City and Straband District Council, and I represent foil state. Many people in the Derry area live next to the toxic dump. It's leaking into their groundwater. And yet, they're still waiting for justice. Did you expect more progress by now on the kind of punishment centre? Absolutely. I think that the criminal sentence has been dragged out in an unacceptable way. That has been the excuse now for years from the departments that we can't tell you exactly what we're going to do. We can't move forward until after the criminal sentence. There was an attempt to basically cover it up and do nothing about it. And people have had to be absolutely relentless in keeping this on the agenda. There's no accountability. And as of yet, more than a decade on, nothing's been done. Do you think there's a kind of a will not to delve into this too deeply because people are worried about what might be discovered, how much it might cost? Yeah, well, I think on a number of fronts, I think that there is a political concern about not having a public hearing, to establish who knew what, when, who gave the green light for this, because this was an open secret for many, many years, for people in Derry, for people in Donnie Goll, for people across the North. And this is, this is why this whole thing is a complete Notre disaster. We put his allegations to the relevant government department in Northern Ireland, and they didn't respond to them directly. But they did emphasise that it was the government's environment agency that vigorously pursued those responsible and gathered the vast amount of evidence that resulted in guilty pleas. They didn't want to comment further until sentencing, which theoretically is due in court later in November. Sean heads off, but the other activists gather in a nearby sewing room with columns of thread reels lining the walls. "Sorry, did you talk the side of your car?" "Apromente?" "Yes, it's a dome." "You can see it, yeah." Some of these people were among the first to raise the alarm about her boy, and they're still raising it today. They had a round tea and cake and pour over the details of what the government is, or rather isn't doing. "It was like, there's three key points for the agenda. One is like the delay in sentence." "Don't worry, we won't play the full meeting. But just dip your toe into how this must feel. They show up at court, waiting for justice, and it's delayed." "I don't know how many days I've booked all four, they like it at hand these cases, and they've just never happened." They're not told why or what's happened. Most of the negotiations seem to be taken place behind closed doors. All of the high public and rail skates the public need to know about it. And yet, they're the ones with more than a million tons of illegal waste on their doorstep. "The real frightening thing is this is a legacy that's now going to be handed down to our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren." "The price of fixing this, that'll be taxed to everyone in Northern Ireland." "They were saying that the options range from 7 million or 17 million, maybe to 700 million. No, the 700 million." "So patience is wearing thin." "A stupidly frustrating, and I have to say no to get an idea, but I've stomping my feet." "Let's ridakeless." "What a non-degrad is going on." "And all of that, in turn, is fueling a lack of confidence in the system." "This is a very abusive process." "Nature is another." "In fact, them just doesn't get an actual fair here, and it's completely unjust." "Which leads to unnerving suspicions." "We seem to be constantly protecting the dumpers." "And questions. How can we trust the authorities today?" "Where's our current waste going? How's it been managed? Who is managing it?" "I'm not denigrating anybody that is in the waste business here, but I still think it's a scary conversation." "That desperately needs to happen." So we think finally it's time to have that scary conversation now. The Mboy scam is over, but what's happening to your recycling? Where's it going? Most of us don't worry too much about that, but we found someone who does. So is this where you're storing all the data? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is. Can we have a look? So this is the spreadsheet, you know this? We're back with the man you heard at the start of this episode. It's the Lation Videos, the Plum and Videos, so I can show you. David Stanksack, a criminologist at Ulster University in Belfast. He's young, with a big beard, a colorful shell suit and very clean trainers. Pick. And he's finally opening the spreadsheet we've been waiting to see for months. So David has just brought up a spreadsheet and it's got different columns of information. Just from a brief look at this spreadsheet, you can see that these trackers have gone from all over the UK, Bristol, Liverpool, Telford, Manchester, lots of names, Glasgow. And how unique is this bit? David and his colleagues teamed up with an NGO, Bars and Action Network, and their Plastic Transparency project, to take a look at where UK Council's recycling ends up. They spent thousands developing sophisticated satellite trackers, which they hid inside plastic bottles and then dropped in recycling bins. At the time of doing it, I was thinking, oh, Jesus, hopefully no one's going to raise alarms about a bearded man. What's that plastic bottle? Going around people's estate and then throwing them into the blue bins or brown bins or whatever. What was your modus up around it? Did you try to act normal? Did you try to do it quickly? What was your technique? At the very start, the way I went about it was I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. But after a while, I actually noticed that nobody notices and cares. Of course nobody cares. That's why all this is possible. There were some glitches, but the trackers worked, and suddenly David became the all-seeing oracle for grimy bottles. They deployed 60 trackers. Approximately a third of them didn't raise any alarm bells. The bottles went off to be processed nearby. The other third didn't really work that well. But the final third of trackers raised questions that require more information. The councils aren't doing anything illegal. It's just not what you'd expect. Like, take Manchester, one of the first to declare a climate emergency with glossy videos of its eco-credentials. Our climate change action plan for 2020 to 25 set out how the council, as an organisation, will have our carbon emissions by 2025. The citywide framework shows how the city's a whole new source of funding. David put the tracker in a household recycling bin attached to a recyclable bottle. They sell the panels at within Gifora. But it ended up in Denmark being burned to help make cement. What we found was that across the industry there are practices which would cause the public to be disconcernd about because when you're putting a plastic bottle into your recycling bin you have a level of confidence and trust because you're doing your part that the people on the other side are doing their part as well. You don't necessarily anticipate or think that it may be incinerated. Greater Manchester combined authority which handles waste for most of the region told us it agrees that burning plastic is fuel is not ideal. But it's up to 15% of waste collected from household recycling bins is too contaminated to recycle. They say they have a robust audit trail for all the waste they collect. But in some cases there's questions about the companies involved too. A tracker putting council recycling in Bedfordshire ended up at a company that's paid out more than 2 million pounds in various fines. And in one awful case from 2013 a worker was shredded to death. In 2015 a fire on its premises raged for a week. A judge said it had ignored previous enforcement notices. It is a red flag that there are companies that have a track record of fines being imposed against them or not complying with certain conditions of their licenses and permits. And they're still operating as normal. The company told us a new owner now operates its name and facility since 2019 and it wouldn't be appropriate to link events before that to the current operation. But this year it was fined £200,000 after a worker suffered serious injuries in 2021 and in June a fire burned down a warehouse. The company told us health and safety is a key focus. It said the fire this year was caused by a lithium battery going through a shredder and increasing risk in the industry. Our Bedfordshire Council told us he wouldn't answer our questions. But what worries us the most is that some of the track has travelled much further. We're talking about thousands to thousands of kilometres and in some cases. He pulls up a map and we can see our plastic bottles moving across Europe. The UK doesn't have the infrastructure to recycle all its own bottles so it's not surprising. But the further they travel from home the less control we have to stop criminals stepping in. The trackers show that a few Northern Irish councils are sending recycling to Spain which is often a transit point to get to Turkey. Two separate reports have highlighted how UK recycling is often illegally dumped there. Videos and pictures of a British plastic packaging being found in fields in the middle of nowhere in Turkey. The industry is so fragmented there is a concern that it can open opportunities for organised crime. Without realising it it's possible councils are opening the doors for criminals by building a vast complicated system that's hard for anyone to keep track of. Even here in the UK though, where crime is on the rise making things worse. Are we doing enough to stop it? That's the job of the Environment Agency. For the first time a former senior leader and the agency has agreed to go on record as to what's really been going on. I created Detective, I joined Gredsmartis Police in 1980 which is an awful lot of time ago though. Andrew Hyam was a detective for 28 years. I was in the CID, predominantly dealing with serious. List your worst criminal nightmares and he's seen them all. After a couple murders, bank robberies, stranger rapes, organised crime groups, drug trafficking, child abduction and I was literally dealing with murder after murder and I wanted to change. After decades in the police he ended up moving to the Environment Agency, becoming one of their most senior people in charge of their national crime team until 2017 and he discovered England's waste problem was an organised crime problem. Some of my stuff we're dealing with, these larger cases, I could see the floor back to drug trafficking, no it was an easy way to laundromoney really to set up a waste company. The agency wanted to do something. There was quite a few people within the organisation, the Environment Agency, that are the passion for this and wanted to drive it forward. But he came to learn that the bosses weren't up to it. The leadership team that I ended up on with, I'd absolutely not concept of criminal investigations. Partly because of history, the agency was set up as a regulator not a police force. The powers are lacking. Which meant they have unfit practices, like notifying suspects before interviews. Well of course with criminals you lose the elements of surprising, you certainly lose evidence capture. Andrew says he tried to change things but overall ran into difficulties. It's faltered and it was faltering then. He came to a depressing conclusion. There's also this risk of aversion, do they really want to take this level of criminality on? I don't think they do in truth. Do you think people in the Environment Agency are a bit scared of these criminals and about what might happen? They're not scared of them per se. Not the scared of is a reputational problem. He believes the agency didn't want to invest the resources, take on the risk of a complex case, so it began to give up on stopping organised crime. Andrew grew more frustrated. I felt like a long voice and then even towards the end it was evident to me that the agency really didn't want to do this and I think they reverted back to type and that saddens me because I think we had made progress. That saddens me really. He left the Environment Agency in 2017 but from where he's sitting he says nothing's changed. Do you think the environment agency can do the job properly then? When you're talking about serious and organised crime, no, I don't think they are. And I don't think they will be in the present regime. Consequences of not doing it properly, the situation will get worse in my view. The chances of getting caught aren't particularly high. And if you do get caught, the penalties aren't that severe. And you can make an awful lot of money actually. We put Andrews allegations to the agency and they rejected them. They said they now have new strength and expanded powers and have helped set up several specialised units to fight organised crime. Since 2018, they've spent 10 million a year fighting Wastewrime. And in the 12 months to March, they prosecuted 83 offenders up from 40 in 2021. But to give you a sense of what they're up against, recent industry reports suggest Wastewrime cost the UK £1 billion a year. And a damning select committee report in 2022 said the country's record was so bad that Wastewrime was effectively decriminalised. It's everywhere isn't it? I mean, that's the point there. Yeah. And it's funny, you kind of see it on sides of roads. We're walking around chewing over all this. Just the signs of it in everyday life. Yeah. These days, we see bin lorries and skip chucks everywhere. It's like a sixth sense. Look, there's another company that we've been tracking. This one. I was a bit shocked the other day when I saw that. Didn't expect to see that here. It's probably more widespread than most people realise. In 2018, the UK Government commissioned a review and found that there were 90 organised crime gangs involved in our waste and recycling. It's a thing, getting large-scale fraud, intimidation, dumping, you name it. In one survey, material recycling world and industry magazine, estimated that two-thirds of victims of modern slavery have worked at some point in recycling and waste. It's like a narnia, a dark one. We're all ignoring. I think there's something psychological about waste that allows this all to happen. We're like, we choose to throw it away. We don't want to look at it's disgusting. Yeah. And because we want nothing to do with it, I think that's prime for criminals, isn't it? I really want to know how far they go, like what's possible for these gangs. I still worry that we don't even realise how far those tentacles reach, as it were. Yeah. I mean, let me just bring up the front of it. We've spent a lot of time trying to get to an answer to that question. Is it possible that our authorities are not just struggling with all this, but actually on occasion, complicit. Because if you look here, I'm just going to zoom in. They really emphasise. For a while, we've been sitting on one document that provides part of an answer. So yeah, it comes with a lot of health warnings. Confidential cannot be shared externally. There's even a bit that says that if it is shared even with a partner agency, it has to be sanitised. What's an interesting word, isn't it sanitised? It's obviously very sensitive. Yeah. And now I think, I'm pretty sure this was never made public. Let's just go down. It's a huge document. And there are just pages on page. It was written by the police in Northern Ireland in 2012, and it looked at the scale of organised crime in waste. What they were doing. They're zoning in on waste crime in 2012. And it's just, I mean, it's a list of astonishing findings of the 20 worst waste companies. Only two didn't have other links to criminality. Eight headlinks to organised crime and six headlinks to paramilitary organisations. And look at the list of what these waste companies were doing. Firearms, organised prostitution, drugs, importation, in some cases death threats. And then it gets to the authorities. There's a significant risk of corruption in relation to government employees. Wow. Even the potential of the passing of bribes to enforcement staff. It gets worse. They found an indication it had already begun happening. It says there are indications that the government and councils were giving contracts to organised criminals. And at least one instance there was an indication of corruption. Gosh. There it is in writing, the indication of corruption. We don't know whether it was the government or a local authority, but we've never seen that sort of concern in writing in a police document before. I'm clutching the document as I walk into Mark Duchamp's office, a former Environment Minister in Northern Ireland. I begin reading it out to him. I think what strikes me and worries me is that the picture they paint is so worrying. So widespread and potentially affecting institutions that it seems like there's little chance that here we are 12 years later and it's all gone away. Yeah, well, wherever there are opportunities to make easy money, you can be sure that there will be criminals who'll do their best to exploit those opportunities. Northern Ireland's not that big of a place and I'd say it would be fair enough to guess that there'd been cooperation between criminal gangs as well and maybe a carve-up going on as well. But when there's money like that to be made, it's hard to think that the tab was turned off overnight. Remember that community centre where the activist met? We brought the document to them too. It felt like they had a right to see it. The fisherman, Dean Blackwood, one of the men who first brought us to my boy, says that after two decades, it's time for the truth. When you read this with the potential that public officials may be corrupted by illegal organisations, maybe emphasises all the more that we need a public inquiry that they are just as quite frightening. We ask another activist, Gerard Moyne, what he thinks. Do you suspect that this might still be going on today? You might not have evidence, but do you think it's possible that a council could be corrupted by a criminal waste company today? Do birds have wings? It's not that recycling is the root of all evil. It's just that we produce so much waste that it's a bananza for dumping, rule-breaking, even criminality. Our waste fuels the gangs and ultimately we now know on occasion even corruption. And that's how a mafia begins. With a few dodgy people. I keep telling myself this story, it won't get any worse. Corruption couldn't still be happening today, could it? And then, always. Something else happens. Yeah, Luke, just look at this. Look at this. I can't believe it. One of the first convictions in Wales under the bribery act. And look what it was over. Look, corruption in Cardiff Council, this is happening now as we go to air five people, more than £300,000 in repayments, jailed following an investigation into the council's recycling centre. Huh. And there it is. Yeah. Recycling corrupted. Barriage is a smote job production for BBC Radio 4, produced and presented by Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor. You can hear the full series now on BBC Sounds. Search for Barried Series One. Hi everyone. Hey, that's Marianna Spring. I'm Sarah Smith and we are a couple of the hosts of America. And right now, as you might imagine, it's not very quiet over in Pocos HQ. We've been keeping ourselves very busy. Yeah, because the two of us, along with Justin Webb and Anthony Zürker, are now getting together a few times a week as we chat through trying to untangle all the twists and turns and developments in the US presidential election. And it'll be fair to say there have been quite a lot of twists and turns already. We've also been chatting a lot about what happens on social media. My favourite topic, if you're interested in US politics, you want to understand what is going on then I think you might really like our podcast, which is simply called America. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds. Till then, we'll see you later. 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