Mark

Surely they should be doing their own testing on receipt, as I know some do?

 

 

 

Good Afternoon Peter,

 

A waste receiver HAS to rely on the information provided – they cannot and should not be expected to judge how well the sampling was done and whether or not someone 20 miles away used a clean stainless steel trowel and an amber jar, or their bare hands and a rubble sack. There would almost certainly be no way of them being able to assess this regardless. As the response you provided suggests – the question is “have they fulfilled their duty of care”, and a landfill operator can certainly do this without double guessing the quality of the laboratory data or quality of the sampling.

 

However, they obviously have a duty of care to ensure all wastes they accept fall within their permit requirements – to do this, the EA state that (verbatim):

 

Landfill operators must carry out the following checks:

 Ensure that there is sufficient waste characterisation information available to make a decision about whether to accept the waste prior to receipt and that this information, once assessed, can be cross-referenced to the waste received.

 Visual check of each waste load to verify that it conforms to the written waste description.

 Verification sampling and testing of key, relevant characteristics (as set out in Sections 4 and 5) to ensure that the waste he accepts complies with the Basic Characterisation.

 

It’s a little unclear, but I understand the verification testing frequency they should adhere to is 3 samples per year, per source or per carrier if the total amount of material disposed of is over 2,000T a year.

 

 

 

Mark

The sort of comments I have had from others (who don’t want to be named) are below. Perhaps this will explain my concerns.

 

What is the risk to a waste receiver if they rely on the honesty, the ability to take representative samples, the suitability of chemical analysis specified, of the waste producer. How will the "Duty of Care" requirement stack up if any of the above 3 aspects are not met. If a waste receiver accepts waste without having a high level of assurance that the above 3 aspects are as they should be, I suspect HMRC will include them in their net if it all goes wrong.

If waste comes in to the waste receiver and is found to be outside their licence, the waste receiver must still pay for the clean-up and removal of the unacceptable waste. There is no guarantee they will get this expense back. The original waste producer if they have not gone bust will be forced to give HMRC any spare money first. Insurance may try to wiggle out of paying. They would have a good argument that the waste receiver really did not perform their duty of care that well and so void the insurance cover

 

 

 

Good Morning Peter,

 

My personal view and understanding would be (I’m not a lawyer or an expert ) that the responsibility for characterising the waste, with the objective to have a full understanding of the waste, lies with the waste producer (and therefore their consultant – if they have commissioned one). Provided the waste producer has undertaken a sufficient frequency of comprehensive testing to inform their classification, they have fulfilled their duty of care and would not be liable any subsequent discovery of bad chemical data. However, if the waste producer did not perform sufficiently broad/targeted analysis when there was evidence to suggest they should have done otherwise, then that would be their fault. I would also say that in the majority of cases, you need to take your chemical results at face value (subject to a quick sense check).

 

A landfill operator needs to satisfy themselves that there is sufficient chemical testing information available to make the assessment of whether or not they accept the waste, but bear in mind they’re not going to critically review a desk study, or site investigation works to determine if the correct testing has been carried out in the first instance, and would not be liable if the actual results proved false / incorrect. I read this to mean a landfill operator would check frequency of chemical testing vs. tonnage being disposed, a check to ensure the minimum expected analytes are included in the testing, and a quick check to verify the classification of the waste.

 

All a landfill operator is expected to do is to perform a visual check to verify that the waste being received matches the waste they are expecting, and to carry out periodic verification testing to confirm their chemical results are in line with those being provided.

 

A haulier is just a method of transport, so have no responsibility except ensuring the paperwork / WTNs are in order.

 

 

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

I have had a number of discussions on the subject of whether an “MCERTS analysis” certificate of non-hazardous ( for WAC under WM3) would be enough to protect the haulier, site operator and consultant from future action by the EA/HMRC if the analysis was found to be incorrect (e.g. contained coal tar that the lab missed.) I have been told by some that, provided the operator has acted in good faith, then they are protected. However, I am told by others that  they fear this not to be the case, especially with the degree of uncertainty that results from variations between results from different labs. I am told that it is up to the operators to prove that a material is non-hazardous. What is the general view?

 

Regards

Peter Fleming

07958 205920

Skype: petermfleming

 

 

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