Britain's Biggest Waste Dumpers Panorama

This is illegal fly-tipping on an epic new scale. The work of some of

Britain's richest waste dumpers. What have you done with the money

Mr Steel? Criminals who've littered our countryside with massive piles

of used tyres - many large enough to be seen from space. Some are on

the run in the sun having pocketed the money British motorists pay to

have their used tyres recycled. It's a rip-off so lucrative

criminal gangs now smuggle our waste tyres and spread pollution

half way around the world. These are people that are making money

and laughing in the face of the law and, indeed, the general public.

And on the High Stree, motorists are handing over millions to help

the environment - but secret filming reveals sometimes what

we're told is wrong. Yeah. The Government now insist that you have

to charge a disposal fee. Majorca. A sunny place for some shady people.

Amid the big yachts and beautiful surroundings, I've come on the

trail of two British criminals who are on the run. This unlikely pair

of Bonnie and Clyde's are facing a possible five-year prison sentence.

It's taken weeks of undercover investigation to track them down...

And now I'm trying to draw them to this cafe in the capital, Palma.

But they don't show up - for now. Steven and Amy Marlow ran a

recycling scam here in North Wales. They collected fees from garages to

dispose of thousands of waste tyres. Then they would rent farm

warehouses to put them in. Like this one. Three years ago, they

told the owner Maria Burt they were bringing in a shredding machine to

help recycle the tyres. So he started bringing the tyres in and

from that end started piling them up? Yes. On top of each other?

How many tyres would he bring in at any one time, do you know? Erm it,

it could be 50 or 60 tyres or it could have been a couple of hundred.

As the tyre mountain grew. Still no sign of a shredding machine. He was

saying, "Well, erm, I haven't got quite enough money to purchase the

machine." And when he did have the money he said, "Oh, erm, it's going

to be delivered in a fortnight's time." And then when it didn't

appear it was, "Oh there's been a delay. It will come." and so on.

Then one day Steven and Amy Marlow disappeared. They'd been there just

over five weeks. In the five or six weeks, how many tyres did he put in

the site? About at that,000. 25,000? Yes.

And this is what Maria was left with.

Tyres pile up inside... And out. The Marlow s few weeks of work

netted them more than �is a,000. Every morning you wake up, the

first thing that comes into your head is you have to get rid of the

tyres, how do you do it? I have not got the money to do it, how do I

get the money Maria has borrowed over �30,000 from friends and

family to get some of the tyres taken away. The job was finished by

the Environment Agency in January at taxpayers' expense because of

the fire risk it posed to local communities. The Marlows moved on

to another victim near by and dumped another 1,000 tyres and

disappeared. The vast majority of motorists

willingly pay garages and tyre fitters an environmental charge to

recycle used tyres. More than �55 million is raised this way each

year, but the garages pay others to recycle the tyres. Sometimes people

like the Marlows. You are paying a price to have the

tyres disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner,

but you are being ripped off by the criminals. They are making money

and laughing in the face of the law and, indeed, the general public.

Back in Majorca, we are still trying to meet up with the Marlows.

Life on the run doesn't seem too bad.

# You know I love you. # Steven Marlow is enjoying a rock and roll

lifestyle with the money he has made. He plays in a band and has

changed his name to Stevie Ray to keep one step ahead of the

authorities. We've arranged a meeting, telling

him we want to hire his band, but he doesn't show up.

Then he tells us to meet him in niche Magaluf.

Again, he doesn't show. Just as we're about to give up, we

get a tip-off. He's at a bar back in the capital.

I'm from BBC Panorama. You are on the run. Why are you on the run?

You dumped thousands of tyres. Tell us why you dumped thousands of

tyres on innocent people and then come running here too? Are you

going back to face justice in the UK, Stevie Ray? Steven Marlow is a

small link in a chain that deals with the 55 million tyres that are

taken off Britain's cars and trucks every year.

There are strict environmental controls about how they should be

disposed of. But the reality can be different.

Vast illegal dumps in the British countryside, some so big they can

be picked up by satellites in space. 100,000 tyres here left on a remote

farm in the Worcestershire countryside.

Further north, 300,000 were abandoned in an industrial estate

in Mexborough, Yorkshire. In the south again, to the biggest of them

all, at one point there were over 2 million tyres dumped at this site

in the Hampshire countryside. This should not be happening.

The so-called green fee we pay to tyre fitters and garages was

introduced by the industry to ensure that the tyres are recycled.

It is usualally between �1 and �2 a tire -- tyre, but it is optional.

So, what happens if you ask about it when you visit big High Street

That's wrong. It is nothing to do with the Government.

Event eally, the fitter agrees that our reporter could take the tyres

At a second Halfords, the optional So even if we dispose of the tyres

ourselves, this branch of Halfords would still charge a disposal fee.

We visited several other High Street tyre fitters and they gave

us confusing information, but Halfords got it plain wrong.

So, where is the money we pay tyre fitters and garages going to? They

use some of it to pay tyre collectors, who are licensed by the

Environment Agency to recycle our old waste tyres.

We collect in the region of about 20 tons a day.

You can see that this is is a general daily amount of tyres.

Andy Carlin's firm collects from dozens of garages around Gloucester

and Worcestershire. This will be gone, it will be

processed today... The green fee garages charge the motorists has

barely changed. Commonly it is about �1.50 per tyre. However, Andy

Carlin has seen the money he gets from the garages drofplt

Four years ago you could get a good price.

It was from over �1 a tyre, 85 pence. Now it is being driven lower

than that. It is down to as low as 65 pence.

That is a big cut. Industry sniders say that the fee

is misused as a profit stream for the tyre fitters and retailers.

The green fee for the property disposal of tyres is a good system,

if that green fee is used appropriately. Unfortunately, as

time has gone on, and it has been in existence for 30 years, a few

retailers have taken advantage of this, they have charged the

customer for the safe disposal and then used that money, really, to

increase their profits. The recycling fee motorists pay

raises �50 million a year, but here is a scene that betrays that green

promise. But this is the dirty secret of the

motorindustry, millions of tyres like this dumped illegally around

the UK. This site in Yorkshire contains 120,000 tyres, they were

dumped by a Lincolnshire tyre collector called Stevie Steel.

Stevie Steel charges garages 70 pence for every tyre that they took

away from the site before dumping them here and walking away with

�80,000 in cash. For two years, his fleet of vans travelled across the

country picking up tyres. The fee undercut all of the legitimate

rivals, the garages did not question the low price.

It meant more profit for them. Stpil -- still, Stevie Steel then

dumped over 1 million tyres in England.

Basically, what he did, when the guard was down of the land owners

and the like, he exploited it by dumping the tyres wholesale without

a regard to what he was to do with them or to deal with them in a

legal manner. Stevie Steel notified the

Environment Agency that he was to restore tyres in the thousands, but

he was actually dealing in hundreds of thousands. Stevie Steel was

prosecuted and spent four months in jail. The court ordered him to pay

back up to �2.5 million. Do you have anything to say to the

people who have to clean up the mess? What have you done with the

money, Stevie Steel? Stevie Steel says he spent it. He's been served

with a proceeds of crime order to pay it back. So far, he has handed

So who's regulating the disposal of tyres in Britain? At the moment the

industry does it itself. The Tyre Recovery Association audits, and

speaks for, the country's big tyre recycling firms. These companies

process up to 80% of used tyres in this country. I think self-

regulation works well.... We operate a voluntary best practice

scheme in this country, the Responsible Recycler Scheme, which

covers between 70 and 80% of nationalising, and that's the

largest scheme of its sort in Europe. The problem we face is that

at the margins, there are operators who work to different standards to

It's left to the Environment Agency to police those on the margins. A

convoy of police and Environment Agency officials is off to raid a

Gives us a shout when you are ready and we will come in. There are four

males who have been detained at this present moment in time. We are

not sure of their identities. We are going to go in there in a few

moments when the police have secured the area Hundreds of tyre

collectors are outside the industry's self regulation scheme.

The Environment Agency are getting tough, like you see today, but do

they have the resources to police the collectors, the garages and the

retailers? They have �17 million a year to tackle waste crime. Not

enough, say those representing the tyre recycling industry. The main

issue in all of this is enforcement and observance of duty of care. And

if some people at the margins of our business decide to disregard

their duty of care, and if the enforcement regime is inadequate,

then we will continue to have Those problems include a series of

tyre dump fires across Britain. An alleged illegal dump went up in

flames in Swansea last year. Some local residents began filming,

little knowing how long the smoke Day two of the fire and the

Environment Agency is checking what One man, however, is taking no

risks. The gas mask could come in useful. Smoke from tyre fires often

contains hydrogen cyanide. generate a lot of black smoke,

which is composed of very fine particles, which can penetrate

quite deeply into the lungs carrying cancer-causing chemicals

in to the body. You also then have to spray water on these fires to

put them out, and that can carry a large number of chemicals with the

water into the local watercourses. The Swansea fire lasted three weeks,

costing �1.5 million to put out. Three people have been arrested and

Job creation through the green economy is a government priority.

In Exeter, Henry Hodge has a recycling business which should be

a great British success story. He has a contract to deliver thousands

of tyre bales to a landfill several miles away. The bales are used to

line the site, to stop toxic chemicals leaking into the

groundwater. As a waste product, it's more environmentally friendly

than the quarried stone its replaces. However, Henry has a

problem. His supply of tyres is drying up. It's a shrinking number

of tyres that we can actually get hold of at the moment. Is this

threatening your business? It is having a knock-on effect directly

to our business, yes. What kind of effect is that having? It's whether

we can actually pitch for these contracts for the large number of

bales for next year, or are we going to have to go back to our

clients and say, "Sorry, next year you're going to have to revert to

using stone." Panorama has found recycling firms like his are

already facing closure or making redundancies because of a shortage

of tyres. The crisis is spreading to other industries. In this cement

factory, shredded tyres are used as fuel - a more environmentally

friendly and cheaper alternative to coal. But now they can't find

enough tyres. Naturally we're very concerned, having invested millions

of pounds in processes and systems to make sure that we can burn tyres

in a safe and sound manner, meeting all the legislations, meeting all

the environmental limits that that we have to. So where are Britain's

tyres disappearing to? A clue lies in the e-mails Henry Hodge has been

receiving. This is something that started over a year ago, probably

18 months ago. We would get e-mails through, requesting volumes of tyre

bales for the export market. the people in the industry were

getting these e-mails? Everyone that was tyre recycling, be it

shredding or baling, was getting an e-mail a week, or more, from

different agents requesting the volume. And it was only when I

spoke to colleagues in the industry that we got an idea of the scale of

the demand from Asia. And what we saw around the country certainly

suggests there is a surge in exports going on. This dump of over

4,000 tyres in Newport is being cleared and will be shipped to

South Korea to be used as fuel. This dump of 150,000 tyres is in

Worcestershire. Its final destination is South Korea. And

Britain's biggest ever illegal dump, in Hampshire - that once topped 2

million tyres -also being emptied to fuel the Asian economic boom.

It's entirely legal to export waste tyres to South Korea, where factory

Not so in some other Asian countries, where they burn tyres in

factories and workshops with few environmental controls. Henry Hodge

can do very little but pass on some of the more suspect e-mail offers

We're going to investigate one of those e-mails ourselves. It comes

from a company called Trading 128, which ships on a regular basis from

the UK, and now it wants to export Henry's tyres to Malaysia to be

recycled. It's legal to export tyres to Malaysia. Trading 128

provided official documents showing Henry's tyres would go to a

recycling plant in one of Malaysia's biggest container ports.

We got someone to go and check it out. Our man sent us some photos of

the address. But the recycling plant doesn't exist. There were no

tyres there and no-one had ever heard of a recycling business. So

where would Henry's tyres have been sent to? Panorama has discovered

that Trading128 were working with this company - Ancelot

Ancerlot have told us they only export tyres from the UK to

Malaysia. And now we have this - documents from a shipping company.

Proof that this company was picking up tyres in the UK and shipping

them all the way to Vietnam. Exporting waste tyres to Vietnam is

illegal. But Panorama has details of the traffic from four locations

- Kidwelly and Caramarthen, Lichfield and Elsenham. In the last

year a total of 1.5 million tyres went to Malaysia and then illegally

Here, waste tyres are big business and their movement is controlled by

organised crime gangs. They take the tyres on a ten-hour lorry

journey up the country, close to the border with China. There, they

are smuggled illegally across the border. And then burnt in

unregulated kilns and furnaces that make ceramics. Not the picture

British motorists had in mind when they hand over their recycling fee.

We're talking about serious and organised criminals. These aren't

people that just dump a few tyres, we're talking about major, major

money that can actually be made from this type of illegal activity.

They're very complex matters and very complex investigations that my

officers deal with. We're back looking for the man behind Trading

128. The owner is a Mr Chu Wong. He's also the director of this

Chinese takeaway in Exeter. When we went to speak to him, he wasn't

there. A few days after our visit, he quit as the director of this

restaurant. He's also left the home address where he registered his

tyre trading business. Despite a number of requests, he has failed

to explain how 1.5 million tyres Official figures say only 2 million

used tyres a year are exported from the UK. Our investigation shows

that just one company can account for three quarters of that traffic.

It suggests the official figures seriously underestimate the volume

of exports and the scale of There are certainly more raids,

like this one in the North of We are carrying out an

investigation in relation to the illegal exportation of waste tyres

to Haiphong in Vietnam in 2011. We have reasons to suspect that these

premises are responsible for this exportation and that the persons

involved in it are present at this time. With Asian buyers covering

the shipping fees and no disposal costs to bear in the UK, there's

money to be made. First of all, as I said, I am going to bring a dog

in that is trained to sniff out cash. That's its primary function.

We'll go around here and just see if there are any large amounts of

cash secreted anywhere. So you suspect they might have money?

There might be, the money is going somewhere so we need to see if we

can get our hands on it. sniffer dog didn't find any cash.

But there are certainly plenty of tyres. Thousands of them. All

collected from garages around here. If convicted, there's a maximum

sentence of up to two years in DEFRA - the Government ministry

that oversees this sector - declined to put up a minister to

talk about the tyre recycling industry. In a statement, it said

it was up to the market to regulate this area. Critics say the free

market has failed to ensure more of the recycling fee is invested in a

UK-wide recycling system for tyres. If the green fee collected was

reinvested into the recycling system, what difference would that

have made to the landscape You might have seen more use of

tyres in a wider variety of energy recovery facilities. But sadly, we

seem to have come down with fewer options rather than expanding those

Back at his yard in the West Country, Henry Hodge won't export

tyres on principal. He thinks British waste should be recycled in

Britain. Our photos of the non- existent tyre recycling facility in

Malaysia only make him more determined. Having seen this, are

you now glad that you didn't go into business with these sorts of

people? 100%, because we're sold as the tyre recycling industry, sold

the idea that these tyres are going to be dealt with responsibly. So

yeah, there isum, yeah. It certainly enforces our case to

keeping it all here in the UK. hoping the Government will clamp

down on all exports, forcing the tyre industry to spend more on

recycling in Britain. Once the money comes back into the tyre

collection industry, there'll be reinvestment into the tyre

recycling industry, which will ensure that our tyres here in the

UK are dealt with in the UK and we are getting some real value back

The Government is relying on the market sorting out this problem.

But with British jobs at risk, while vast amounts of our waste are

shipped abroad, can the market On Thursday, a Panorama special

tests the science behind the advertising claims of some of