The illegal route of more than 700 tons of toxic waste from Vallès

BarcelonaIllegalities in waste management do not always involve an international trafficking like the one uncovered last week coming from France. Often the route is much shorter and offenders do not even need to change counties to achieve economic benefits at the expense of endangering the environment and human health. This is the case of the network that operated between two companies in Badia del Vallès, a landfill thirty kilometers away, and land in Cerdanyola del Vallès, now owned by the Consorci del Parc de l'Alba. The defendants are awaiting trial.

According to the indictment to which ARA has had access, those involved made money by reselling metals such as copper extracted from motors and electrical appliances, and then, allegedly, disposed of the remains by passing them off as non-hazardous waste, or by directly dumping toxic materials on the ground. Seven people and three companies are awaiting trial for this case, accused of an environmental crime for illegally dumping more than 700 tons of waste. In the trial, still without a date, the defendants will face sentences of seven years in prison. On the other hand, for the two companies, the prosecution is seeking a five-year ban on activities related to waste management and a fine of 216,000 euros each.

The case was uncovered on February 11, 2019, when a truck driver was caught dumping large quantities of waste on land in Cerdanyola. That site had housed a ceramic materials factory, which in 2008 had been expropriated by the Consorci de l'Alba. The company, however, had permission to continue there until the Consortium definitively occupied the space. The moment came more than a decade later, and during the deconstruction of the old factory, all the toxic dumps were exposed. The truck driver, who will not be tried, was working under the orders of the manager of a scrap metal company in Badia del Vallès and with the approval of the head of the ceramic company that was being dismantled.

The same worker was caught again a month later, at dawn, when he broke into the area to deposit more waste. Again, he was dumping remains that came from a metal shredder in Badia del Vallès. According to the prosecutor in the indictment, depositing this waste in an open area not prepared for the management of hazardous waste is much more economical than doing it correctly, but it meant losing control over the polluting elements they contained, which caused a serious risk to natural systems and people.

The analyses of the remains dumped in the area found toxic elements such as antimony, a toxic metal used in the manufacture of batteries. The investigation has documented that, in less than two months, between the end of January and mid-March 2019, at least 38 truck movements were made, dumping 604.12 tons on this land.

150 more tons in Can Mata

The origin of these remains has been located in Badia del Vallès, specifically in two scrap metal companies that, although formally two, in practice acted as one. The links were also familial: the administrators of one are sons of the manager of the other. According to the public prosecution, one of these companies did not have a license and the other had one to deal with scrap metal, but the City Council had denied it permission to also recover metals from dismantled vehicles. Despite this, the accused allegedly started up, without a license, a shredder and a metal separator, and from then on they dedicated themselves to collecting motors and electrical appliances to extract the valuable metals that they could resell.

The process of shredding these metals for resale produced a large quantity of hazardous waste, mainly because they contained polychlorinated biphenyls, a chemical compound widely used in electrical equipment. These remains were not useful for resale, and disposing of them properly would have been much more expensive than throwing them away as common waste. According to the Prosecutor's Office, for this reason they concealed the category of this waste and delivered it to the Can Mata landfill in Anoia.

The investigation compiled by the prosecutor has documented at least eight trips between January 2018 and July 2019 in which 152.76 tons of waste from the fragmentation of electric motors and batteries in Badia del Vallès were dumped at Can Mata. All this under the label of non-hazardous waste. To feign this category, the accused provided an analysis of the waste that did not include the "critical parameters" that would have revealed the risk. In this case, the deception was dismantled during an inspection requested by the landfill management company. Samples taken at the shredder detected critical levels of various hazardous elements.