A man has been ordered to pay more than £7,000 to a farmer after his company dumped 20 tonnes of asbestos contaminated waste on farmland.
Grant Brown, 35, has also been banned from being a company director for three years following the waste crime on land in Stocksfield, Northumberland.
The clean-up of the waste cost the farmer over £32,000, according to the Environment Agency.
He appeared in court on 14 September after previously pleading guilty to allowing his firm to cause waste to be dumped on farmland, failing to comply with duty of care legislation, and failing to produce waste transfer notes.
Gary Wallace, who works at the Environment Agency, said waste criminals left 'huge clean up bills' for farmers and landowners.
"In this case we were able to trace the waste back to Brown’s company and after an Environment Agency investigation he’s been put before the courts for his offending."
Brown, trading as GB Waste Management and operating out of Bells Close Industrial Estate in Lemington, claimed to collect and dispose of waste.
The court heard that in September 2021, an Environment Agency officer attended the Bells Close site to investigate a report of an illegal waste site.
It was confirmed Brown’s company did not have an environmental permit, which is required to minimise the impact on the environment.
The site had several skips full of waste including bricks, tiles, plasterboard, wood and soil.
During a follow up visit with the council in November, Brown told officers the company had been dissolved and all skips and trucks had been sold. He said the site would be cleared.
However, at the end of the same month, a post on the company’s Facebook page showed before and after images of a pile of waste cleared from a residential garden, evidence that the company was still active.
Overnight, in November 2021, 20 tonnes of waste was dumped on farmland at Stocksfield.
Personal identifiable items were found amongst the construction and domestic waste which the Environment Agency traced back to Brown’s company.
