On a bright but chilly February morning, around a dozen volunteers gather by the beachfront at Minster, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
In bobble hats and walking boots, they carry blue plastic bags and litter pickers.
They wander slowly past the dog walkers and brightly painted beach huts, combing the pebbles for waste. But the rubbish they’re looking for isn’t normal litter; it’s builders’ rubble and shredded household waste.
It was dumped en masse by the lorry load, at an illegal dump site further up the coast by Eastchurch Gap, between 2020 and 2023.
“It’s lots of guttering that washes up, whole pipes, tiny rawlplugs, decorators’ caulk, bits of plastic and cable ties – it’s disgusting,” says Chris, as he pulls out items from his bin bag – filled in just 20 minutes.
Belinda Lamb, who organises the clean-ups, describes seeing “shredded Christmas trees, bits of carpet, even the spongy material from playgrounds”.
“It’s really sad,” she says. “It’s having a huge impact on marine life – and probably our lives – because if fish are eating this plastic, then so are we.”
They tell me that five years ago, lorries started turning up to tip waste over the cliffs at an illegal dump site a few miles away at Eastchurch Gap.
Day after day the vehicles arrived, leaving behind mounds of rotting rubbish and plastic that fills the shoreline, gets picked up by the sea and flung out by the waves further down the beach.
Locals are angry, and feel let down. Volunteers repeat their clean-up work monthly – but the sea keeps washing it in. They fear the area, a site of scientific special interest, will be like this for decades.
“It should have been stopped immediately,” Elliott Jayes, the chair of Minster on Sea Parish Council, says.
“The Environment Agency should have been able to slap a stop notice on it, and it should then immediately stop and prosecutions start straight away.”
Investigations are ongoing at the site. In 2023, magistrates first granted the Environment Agency a six-month restriction order to close it down, which has since been extended.
The gate has been locked ever since, with concrete blocks installed to stop vehicles.
‘The new narcotics’
We don’t know who’s behind the Eastchurch Gap site, nor why they dumped the rubbish, but illegal tips are a huge problem across the country and one that’s increasingly being exploited by criminal gangs.
“What we’re seeing is actually more and more evidence of really serious organised criminal gangs operating in the waste sector, because it’s such a low risk, high reward activity,” explains Sam Corp from the Environmental Services Association.
It’s something the previous head of the Environment Agency called “the new narcotics”, and Sam says waste criminals can be involved in multiple offences, from money laundering to human trafficking.
It’s thought one-fifth of all waste in England is being illegally managed. That’s around 34 million tonnes a year, enough to fill about four million skips.
It’s understood to cost the economy around a billion pounds a year, with a further £3bn thought to hit legitimate operators from missed business.
Forms of waste crime include fly-tipping to avoid paying tax or high processing costs, as well as illegal fires and exporting waste to other countries with looser regulations.
But criminal gangs are also a sizable part of the problem.
Chief innovation and technical development officer for Suez, Stuart Hayward-Higham, explains how the gangs operate.
“Imagine you’re a business, so I come along and I say, ‘I’ll pick up your waste and deal with it’.
“You pay me as though I’m going to treat it properly. So maybe £50 to collect it, manage it, and £100 to treat it. I pick it up and instead of spending the money to treat it, or recycle it, I just throw it on the ground somewhere.
“Then I keep all the profit.”
He says criminals can set themselves up with a licence to manage waste for as little as £154, making hundreds of thousands – even millions of pounds – in this manner.
‘Low fines not a deterrent’
Despite the scale of the issue, Sam Corp doesn’t believe the authorities have enough resources.
“A £1bn problem merits a lot more than the £10m that the Environment Agency gets to tackle this issue every year,” he says.
“We need regulations to be much tougher and stronger and more strongly enforced. And even if you do get caught, the penalties are far too low and they’re not enough of a deterrent.”
He says the criminals “see fines as a legitimate business expense”.
Of the 1,453 illegal dump sites recorded by the Environment Agency in the last decade, just 64 led to some form of enforcement.
Thirteen were prosecutions, 14 saw warning letters sent and 26 were logged as leading to “advice and guidance”.
Some 319 of the sites were thought to be linked to organised crime, 130 were hazardous waste, and 261 were in rivers.
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In response, an Environment Agency spokesperson called waste crime “toxic”.
“It causes widespread and significant harm to people, places, the environment, and the economy,” they said.
“We are determined to make life harder for criminals by disrupting and stopping illegal activity through tough enforcement action and prosecutions.
“Last year we successfully shut down 462 illegal waste sites, bringing the total number in operation to the lowest on record.”
