Industrial-scale fly-tipping is spreading across Britain

Tony Soprano, mobster and protagonist of HBO’s “The Sopranos”, ostensibly ran a waste-management business. It’s an industry, he complained, where “everybody immediately assumes you’re mobbed up. It’s a stereotype. And it’s offensive.” It may be a stereotype, but in Britain it is one that increasingly rings true. The growing involvement of organised crime in the waste industry is helping generate a rash of enormous illegal fly-tips.

One in Kidlington, near Oxford, is six metres high and 150 metres long, and weighs 20,000 tonnes. The trash was dumped over the summer by an organised gang branching out. It is not alone. A House of Lords committee recently heard that waste crime has been overtaken by organised-crime groups otherwise involved in dealing drugs, firearms and humans.

Environmental crime is rising globally. But among rich countries Britain appears particularly vulnerable to industrial-scale illegal dumping. Italy was once the prime example. Between the 1990s and 2010s mafia groups dumped over 11m tonnes of waste in Campania, now dubbed the “triangle of death” for its high cancer rates. England’s worst-affected area, according to the Environment Agency (EA), a regulator, is Cumbria and Lancashire, where some 2.3m tonnes has been dumped over the past decade. That underestimates the true scale (just a quarter of waste crime is reported, estimates the EA); by some calculations Britain’s waste problem looks worse than Italy’s in the 1990s.

Whereas waste criminals in France and Germany specialise in trafficking the stuff to other EU countries (such as Croatia and Romania) with looser regulations, British criminals stay domestic. Last year the EA discovered 749 new illegal waste sites, nearly double what it found in 2024.

In the ten years to 2024 the average size of illegal waste sites investigated by the EA has increased by 50%. Emma Viner, its enforcement manager, says: “We shut down hundreds of illegal sites every year but unfortunately more are opening.” Such sites incur huge clean-up costs and batter the local environment. They also annoy voters.

Why is the problem growing? The main reasons are economic incentives, bad regulations and the mobs’ involvement.

Illegal waste sites differ from old-school fly-tips. Whereas a popular fly-tipping spot might consist of a few vanloads dumped by opportunistic locals, illegal waste sites are filled by the lorryload—with on-site excavators piling processed trash into pre-dug trenches long into the night. They are built by organised criminals masquerading as legitimate waste-managers, offering businesses and households a cheap way to dispose of waste.

Demand for their services exists because disposing of waste legally has become irksome and costly. Tips run by local councils have become harder to access, with some requiring payment, restricted opening hours and the need to book slots in advance. Landfill tax, a levy charged on every tonne of waste, has lifted costs dramatically. The lower rate, of £4.05 ($5.70) per tonne and due to rise to £8.65 next month, is charged on “inert” waste like soil. The main offender is the standard rate, which applies to most household and commercial waste. After adjusting for inflation, it has jumped from £14.18 in 1996 to £126.15 today—one of the highest rates in Europe.

By some measures this has been a success. Britain now recycles around 45% of its household waste, up from 5% in 1996. But landfill tax also makes illegal dumps exceedingly profitable. Whoever is behind Kidlington’s would have avoided £2.5m in landfill tax in just four months.

Flawed regulations make things worse. Dealing with small-scale fly-tipping is the responsibility of the local council. Only when a dump exceeds 20 tonnes does it become the EA’s problem. Most start small and expand. The result is a “merry-go-round” that sees cases passed from one authority to another, explains Matthew Scott, police and crime commissioner for Kent.

Landowners are responsible for cleaning up the waste dumped on their land, creating an incentive not to report illegal dumping. The licensing system is equally troublesome. One study found that 60% of businesses offering waste handling appear to be unlicensed. And the process is easily gamed. A frustrated waste consultant once successfully registered his dead dog, Oscar, for a waste-carrier’s licence.

All of this is good news for career criminals, for whom waste crime is low-risk and high-reward. Consider Operation Cesium. After an eight-year investigation three men were found guilty in January 2025 of dumping 26,000 tonnes of waste at illegal sites (avoiding more than £2.7m of landfill tax). The clean-up is estimated to cost the taxpayer more than £3m. Between them, the men received fines of just £65,000. Only one, already in prison for money-laundering, received a custodial sentence. Two and a half years were added to his term. For comparison, trafficking £3m-worth of cocaine might get you ten years.

French and German judges can impose up to ten years in prison for serious environmental crimes. The maximum in Britain is five. Anna Willetts, an environmental-defence lawyer, says the EA’s cases are also poorly put together and poorly managed. “They’re not cut out for dealing with this level of crime at all,” she adds.

If Tony Soprano were around today, and in rural England, he’d be a fool not to dip into the business of illegal waste. ■