An offer you can't refuse – organised crime's link to fly-tipping

Foam mattresses, broken fridge-freezers and unwanted furniture are scarring the landscape in Britain and the culprits aren't just lazy or irresponsible householders.

Waste has become "big business", said The Telegraph. A "network of organised criminals" is now "operating in the shadows", preying on customers "acting in good faith" and unaware that their household waste is being dumped at unauthorised sites.

'The new narcotics'

Local authorities in England dealt with 1.15 million fly-tipping incidents in 2023-24, up 6% from the year before. But although the "junk heaped on our highways" might suggest this is "a country of indolent, thoughtless householders" with "scant regard" for the environment, "the truth is a little more nuanced".

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Illicit waste disposal "generates billions of pounds" for gangs, said The Guardian. These range "from low-level criminals offering to take waste away on the cheap then dumping it" to sophisticated criminal organisations "infiltrating legitimate waste disposal companies and gaining contracts".

The Environment Agency says that almost a fifth of English waste is now handled by criminals at some point in the chain and describes serious waste crime as "the new narcotics". The National Crime Agency said in 2019 that it was aware of 20 organised groups linked to waste crime in the UK.

Organised crime's involvement in rubbish disposal has surged "in tandem with the incremental rise in landfill tax", said The Telegraph, and it's thought that "the public purse" lost out on £100 million due to landfill tax evasion in the 2022-23 tax year alone.

The ecomafia

The waste disposal industry is historically no stranger to criminality. In New York, the city's garbage collection and processing industry was infamously under the control of the mafia until a massive crackdown in the 1990s. Codenamed Operation Wasteland, the undercover investigation led to the prosecution and conviction of more than 100 people involved in price-fixing and bid rigging of waste hauling contracts worth millions.

In Italy, authorities have long struggled to crack down on the so-called "ecomafia" – criminal gangs who dump or burn huge amounts of illicit waste, causing serious damage to the environment.

Earlier this year, the European Court of Human Rights condemned the country's government for its failure to contain illegal burning by the Camorra mafia clan in a region of Campania that has come to be nicknamed the Terra dei Fuochi (land of fires). The area "has become known as the 'triangle of death' for its record-high cancer-related mortality rates", said Politico.