Home Fly-tipping: What You Need to Know?
Fly-tipping: What You Need to Know?
Fly-tipping is frustrating for everyone. It affects residents, landowners, businesses and visitors, spoiling our local environment and costing time and money to clear up.
Most people know that dumping rubbish illegally is a crime. However, many people are surprised to learn that they can also become involved in a fly-tipping offence if they do not take the right precautions when arranging for their waste to be removed.
Before reading the information below, we’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to complete our quick quiz and see how much you know about fly-tipping.
The answers will help us understand where there may be gaps in knowledge, allowing us to provide clearer, more useful information through this and future awareness campaigns.
Check how much you know about fly-tipping:
<< Fly-Tipping – Quick Quiz >>
Your Duty of Care
If you arrange for waste to be removed from your home, garden, land or business, you have a legal duty of care to ensure it is handled and disposed of responsibly.
This means you should always check that the company or individual taking your waste away is a registered waste carrier.
STOP. THINK. CHECK.
Before handing over your waste, check the waste carrier’s credentials on the Environment Agency website.
If your waste is later found dumped illegally and investigators can trace it back to you, you may be held responsible if you failed to carry out the necessary checks.
If you suspect that a company or individual has not disposed of your waste legally, contact the Environment Agency on 0800 80 70 60 or report it anonymously through Crimestoppers.
There are also several legal and convenient ways to dispose of unwanted items.
Every householder, business and landowner, occupier or manager has a ‘duty of care’ to take all reasonable measures to ensure waste is removed from their property and disposed of in a responsible and legal manner. You must ensure the company or person is a registered waste carrier.
There are a number of other options available for removing waste from your property:
- Take the waste to either of Mole Valley’s recycling centres: Ranmore Road in Dorking or Randalls Road in Leatherhead. Check before you travel that the centres accept the waste you have
- If you have had work done to your garden, use our fortnightly garden waste service
- Try our collection service for bulky household items, including rubble and plasterboard
- If you believe that the waste is reusable or could be fixed, contact the Surrey Reuse Network who can collect the items and re-condition them
If you suspect that a contractor or trades person is not disposing your waste in a responsible and legal manner, please call the Environment Agency hotline on 0800 80 70 60 or report it online by visiting the Crimestoppers website.
Please Don’t Leave Bags Beside Bring Banks
While it may seem helpful to leave a bag of clothes next to a textile recycling bank when it’s full, items left outside the bin cannot be collected for recycling. Instead, they often have to be treated as waste and may ultimately end up in landfill.
Leaving bags of clothing or other textiles beside a recycling bank is classed as fly-tipping.
Unfortunately, once items start to build up, it can encourage others to leave rubbish there too, creating a larger problem for the local area
If a textile recycling bank is full, please take your items home and try again another day, or use the free kerbside textile collection service available to eligible households in Mole Valley.
Free kerbside textile collection information >
More information and links reporting fly-tipping and fly-posting are available on our website.