Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions - Keep Britain Tidy

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Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions One can see that it is a complex interplay of the offenders judgement of the ease, rewards, and risks that lead them to engage in this kind of fly-tipping, and that these judgements are affected by many different aspects of the environment in which they work – the effectiveness of the regulation system, the economic incentives and levers, the design of trucks, the availability of suitable locations, the ease of making excuses for your behaviour, and so on. There are a number of important implications of this way of thinking about such problems: 1. These factors work in combination to affect offenders’ judgements. This implies that dealing with any one of these could alter the opportunity structure sufficiently to have an impact on the problem. 2. Defining the opportunity structure enables a range of potential interventions to be identified, and helps to expand the scope for action. 3. The opportunity structure will be different for different kinds of problem behaviour. The analysis has to be very crime specific. The example above applies to a very well defined problem of large scale tipping of construction and demolition waste. It would not apply to householders dumping black bags of rubbish over the railway fence. This problem would have a very different opportunity structure and require, therefore, very different interventions. Future research that is policy oriented should aim to develop an understanding of the opportunity structures underlying the different kinds of fly-tipping problem. Profiling different fly-tipping problems All the available evidence is that household waste appears to make up most incidents of fly-tipped waste (EnCams,1998; Defra, the Environment Agency and the LGA, 2005). Studies also show that the locations in which fly-tipping takes place are very varied. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 1998) suggests the following as common fly-tipping sites: • Undeveloped lots/abandoned structures/unused industrial facilities; • poorly lit access roads; • property along railways and highways; • alleys; • charity drop box locations; • construction sites; • forests/woods/farms; and • borders of cities and counties because of lack of police presence in these areas EnCams (1998) identifies a rather different, and more rural, list of commonly fly-tipped places which include: • Lay-bys; • field openings; 13
Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions • roadside verges; • outside tips; and • hedge bottoms in country lanes, cul-de-sacs and car parks. ‘Other highways’ and ‘industry/warehousing/retail sheds’ emerge from the more recent Local Environmental Quality Survey of England (EnCams, 2003). An unpublished survey of farms in England and Wales (Marcus Hodges Environment Limited & BDB Associates, 2002) suggested that gateways were the most commonly fly-tipped hot spot, followed by ditches and fields. A more robust study of fifty sites along the River Taff and its catchment area found many kinds of location suffered from fly-tipping (Williams and Simmons, 1999). Seventy-five percent of industrial sites, 62% of commercial areas, 48% of residential sites and 45% of open spaces were fly-tipped. These surveys identify a wide variety of locations where fly-tipping takes place. Searching for common characteristics of what makes a fly-tipping location suitable, the EPA claims that tippers look for convenient places to tip where the chance of being caught is considered small. They suggest that locations on jurisdiction boundaries may be vulnerable in this respect. Another common ‘requirement’ seems to be that sites allow easy vehicular access. Williams and Simmons (1999) found that 60% of the sites which had good vehicular access had been fly-tipped, compared with just 28% of sites without vehicular access. This suggests that inability to transport waste to a legal disposal site it not a driver for such fly-tipping. It also points to ways in which popular fly-tipping locations might be protected. Who fly-tips? The kinds of analysis cited above do not lend any insight into the various different kinds of fly-tipping problem. Analysis of who fly-tips, however, quickly reveals different sub-sets of fly-tipping problems, each with its own set of drivers and, therefore, ‘opportunity structures’. According to the London wide Initiative for Fly-tipping (LIFT, cited in EnCams, 1998), there are four groups of people who fly-tip. 1. Organised criminal fly-tippers, for whom financial reward is the driver 2. Commercial fly-tippers wanting to avoid waste disposal charges 3. Domestic fly-tippers for whom legal disposal methods are inconvenient 4. Travellers who leave a lot of waste on their sites Source: LIFT, 1984 cited in EnCams, 1998. Organised criminals The inclusion of organised crime as a separate group begs the question of how these are defined, and how they are different from the three other groups listed. In relation to the export of stolen cars, for example, Brown and Clarke (2004) concluded that there is less involvement of conventional organised 14
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Fly-tipping: Causes, Incentives and Solutions - Keep Britain Tidy

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