Government Response

The Government responded to this petition on Tuesday 29th June 2021

The Environment Agency regulates environmental permits that set limits, including for malodours, within which operations can be undertaken without causing a significant impact on the environment.

Whilst no dedicated review of the monitoring and management of odours from landfill is currently planned, the Government and the Environment Agency (EA) keep the legislative framework and powers available to protect human health and the environment under review. The result of such work is evident through our Resources and Waste Strategy and our ambition to eliminate crime and poor performance in the waste sector.

The Government takes the issue of odour from landfill seriously and there have been debates in Parliament on this topic, most recently on 19 May 2021.

Landfill and other types of waste management facility are regulated by the EA in England, which issues and regulates environmental permits. These permits set limits, including for odours, within which operations can be undertaken without causing a significant impact on the environment. Whilst no landfill will ever be completely odour free, the level and type of odour arising from such operations should not be causing serious offence.

Where appropriate, operators must provide an Odour Management Plan describing measures they will take to minimise odour. The EA sets out how the monitoring should be carried out, the required competency of staff and the equipment to be used. If the plan is accepted, it is incorporated into the site’s environmental permit as an ‘operating technique’. The operator should keep that plan under review and the plan can be required to be updated if there is a problem, or if it is not working as originally intended. The EA also imposes a condition that requires operators to use approved measures to manage their activity to minimise odour emissions. If operations are not being undertaken in accordance with these plans, then the EA has a range of enforcement powers they can and do use.

Monitoring odour can be challenging, so there are no numerical limits for odour or particular gases in landfill permits. This is due to the variability of the gas composition, rapid dispersion once it escapes the waste mass and challenges in monitoring this. The EA therefore uses a condition in environmental permits which is based on ‘offence to the senses’; this means that the odour is assessed by the level of offence it causes to a trained EA officer.

In order to demonstrate non-compliance, an EA officer must receive a report of odour, attend the location that the odour is reported, confirm it is coming from the site and demonstrate that the site is, or is not, doing something that has been specified in their Odour Management Plan or is contrary to Best Available Techniques. This condition has evolved over a number of years following prosecutions and case law derived from them. If non-compliance is confirmed, EA officers can take action in line with the Enforcement and Sanctions Policy.

The EA provides an incident response function to deal with environmental incidents. It prioritises incidents by focusing on those that have a human health impact, followed by environmental and amenity impacts such as odour, dust or noise. The scale and impact of the incident is also factored into this process, so a low impact incident from a health perspective which has attracted a lot of reports will be escalated and responded to. It is not possible for the EA to attend all the incidents it is notified of, so this process of prioritisation is used to attend higher risk incidents only.

Local authorities also have a role to play in managing issues considered to be a nuisance, including odour. If a waste management site is operating in a manner that is having an effect on local communities but is not contravening the conditions within the environmental permit, then the local authority has the power to act when determining if a statutory nuisance exists.

The determination of a statutory nuisance has two limbs: whether it is ‘prejudicial to health’ or a ‘nuisance’. To be a ‘nuisance’ the situation must unreasonably and substantially interfere with the personal comfort or amenity of those nearby. What is unacceptable is that which ordinary, decent people would consider unreasonable. If the local authority agrees that a statutory nuisance has happened or will happen in the future, then it must serve an abatement notice on the person, premises owner or occupier concerned.

The decision regarding whether or not an issue is a statutory nuisance is made by the local authority’s Environmental Health Practitioner on a case by case basis.

The Government wants to minimise the volume of waste sent to landfill, including eliminating food waste to landfill by 2030. By reducing the volume of waste that we send to landfill, in particular biodegradable waste, we will reduce negative impacts from landfill. The Government is also reforming the framework under which waste is transported and is committed to the mandatory electronic tracking of waste. This will prevent inappropriate and misclassified waste such as gypsum ending up in landfill where it can emit odours.

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

This is a revised response. The Petitions Committee requested a response which more directly addressed the request of the petition. You can find the original response towards the bottom of the petition page (https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/582702)