Waste company ordered to pay £50,000 after polluting river

8:09am Wednesday 24th February 2010

By Richard Harris

A WASTE company has been hit with a bill of more than £50,000 for allowing brewery effluent to pollute a river for more than a year.

VWS (UK) Limited held environmental permits in 2008 and 2009 to operate effluent treatment plants for two breweries in Tadcaster – Scottish & Newcastle and Coors.

Yesterday at Selby Magistrates’ Court, VWS pleaded guilty to ten offences of breaching environmental permits and asked for a further 306 breaches to be taken into consideration.

The company, of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, was fined a total of £40,000 and ordered to pay full prosecution costs of £11,052.93 and a victim surcharge of £15.

Craig Burman, prosecuting for the Environment Agency, told the court that the River Wharfe at Tadcaster was unpolluted and an important amenity to the local community. He said that VWS had designed and built treatment plants for the breweries’ waste.

The environmental permits held by the company specified the levels of suspended solids, ammonia and biological oxygen demand (BOD) which could be discharged into the river. BOD measures the amount of substances in water which deplete the oxygen.

The court heard that between June 2, 2008, and July 26, 2009, VWS regularly breached limits from the treatment plant for the Scottish & Newcastle brewery, when BOD levels were up to 27 times higher than permitted.

VWS asked for a further 178 breaches to be taken into consideration, relating to levels of suspended solids, BOD and ammonia.

In addition, between April 21, 2008, and July 31, 2009, Mr Burman said VWS was in breach of discharge limits for suspended solids, BOD and ammonia from the treatment plant for the Coors brewery. BOD levels were up to 16 times those permitted and ammonia levels were up to almost four times those permitted.

VWS asked the court to take into consideration a further 128 breaches, relating to levels of suspended solids, biological oxygen demand and ammonia.

Mr Burman told the court the levels of pollution discharged into the River Wharfe had the potential to harm the river.

Mark Howard, mitigating, said VWS had found it difficult to deal with and accommodate the different processes at each brewery and accepted the site management did not effectively control pollution levels.

He said as soon as the board became aware of the breaches it implemented steps to address the problem, and the convictions would impact on the company’s competitiveness and reputation.

In passing sentence, the magistrates noted that this was a “systematic failure” by VWS to prevent the discharges and was due to poor management systems, and that the breaches had occurred over a lengthy period of time.