The Thurso case
The waste dumped at Weydale near Thurso reads like the inventory of a dozen house clearances: black bags of household rubbish, furniture, white goods, plasterboard, insulation, carpets, doors, tyres, garden waste and asbestos sheeting. None of it was the dumper's own. It had been collected from other people.
SEPA used a variable monetary penalty, a civil sanction it can impose without a criminal prosecution, of £12,327.08, and recovered £3,698.12 in investigation costs, for a total of £16,025.20. Its statement noted the particular harm where asbestos is involved, and ended with advice aimed squarely at the people whose waste it was: if in doubt, don't hand over your waste.
That is the point of the case for anyone reading this. The waste came from customers who paid someone to take it away. Some of them will have believed it was going to the tip.
- Civil penalty announced 10 February 2026
- £12,327.08 penalty plus £3,698.12 costs
- Total £16,025.20
- Dumping between March 2020 and May 2021
- Household bags, furniture, white goods, tyres, asbestos
- SEPA: 'If in doubt, don't hand over your waste'
The tools SEPA now has
Civil penalties are the big change. SEPA can impose a variable monetary penalty proportionate to the offence and the gain from it, without waiting for a court, and it has used the power repeatedly through 2025 and 2026. A separate Aberdeenshire case in 2025 ended in a community payback order, a confiscation order and supervision after a report to the Procurator Fiscal.
Fixed penalties for fly-tipping rose from £200 to £500 on 1 January 2024, and the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024 allows ministers to raise the maximum to £1,000 and to set higher amounts for repeat offences. The full range is in fly-tipping penalties in Scotland.
Behind those sit the reformed SEPA registration system, live since April 2026, and digital waste tracking from January 2027, which will make a load that never arrives at a permitted site visible for the first time.
Check us first
WCR/R/3002381, on SEPA's public register. Then send a photo of the load for a fixed price.
Why it lands on the customer too
The duty of care (your legal responsibility for waste you produce) applies to whoever produces waste, and that is you. Handing waste to someone who is not registered with SEPA is an offence in itself, with a fixed penalty and a fine of up to £5,000, and it does not matter that you did not do the dumping. What happens if you're caught fly-tipping covers the mechanics.
When a dump is traced, and the Thurso waste contained doors and carpets and paperwork, the trail runs back to the households it came from. That is when the question of whether you checked the carrier gets asked, and your rubbish is still your responsibility is the honest answer.
The check takes a minute on SEPA's public register, and how to check a waste carrier is registered walks through it. The price is the other tell: a quote that could not cover legal tipping at £130.75 a tonne of landfill tax is a quote for a field.
If it lands on your land
On private land, including a farm track, a tenement back green or a factored bin store, clearing dumped waste is the owner's responsibility even though none of it was their doing. Report it to the council and SEPA, photograph it before anything is touched, and do not put it in your own bins. The steps are in someone fly-tipped on my land.
Anything that might be asbestos stays where it is until a licensed contractor deals with it. We do not carry asbestos, and neither does any general carrier who is telling you the truth.
For everything else our fly-tipping clearance service clears the load, photographs it for your records and provides a transfer note showing where it went, which is the paperwork that matters if the dump is ever investigated. The general service is rubbish removal, registered under WCR/R/3002381 and on the public register.
