OPERATORS of a waste transfer station in Wellington have been fined £32,000 after admitting they allowed hazardous waste on the site, contrary to their permit.

Taunton Deane Magistrates heard on Thursday that Wellington Waste, at The Old Brickworks, Higher Poole, run by Anthony and Brenda Palfrey, had allowed unsuitable waste including asbestos to be dumped on site.

The couple say they accept responsibility and the error came about because they filled in an incorrect form.

Wellington Waste transfer station is classed as a non-hazardous waste site.

During a routine site inspection on March 8 five skips of asbestos were found on site outside of the licensed area.

Wellington Waste were visited again on March 27 where it was found that all five skips of asbestos had been put into a larger skip and had been moved into the licensed area.

Wellington Waste said that this was because the people who had originally delivered the waste had failed to collect the material.

The pair pleaded guilty to three offences of breaching the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

They were fined £32,000 and ordered to pay costs of £982.

Catherine Lockwood of the Environment Agency said: "By bringing these cases to court we want to draw attention to the fact that licence holders have a legal responsibility to dispose of waste properly and that might mean returning it to the person who deposited it."

In a statement Wellington Waste said that when unacceptable waste is found it is their policy to contact the person responsible to dispose of it correctly. They said they did this and gave names and addresses of those responsible to the agency.

They said: "Our error came about due to the fact we failed to fill out the correct form.

"We tried to comply with our licence by putting the waste into one skip. This complied with the allowance of having one skip of permitted waste within the licensed area.

"While we take full responsibility, we feel that as we have never been in trouble during entire 25 years of trading, we are just an easy target for their publicity machine. Even the local agency representative was apologetic as he felt the fine was far in excess of the crime, especially as we had accepted responsibility for our error and pleaded guilty. This was not irresponsibility on our part but simply an admin error. We have learned valuable lessons from this and have put in stringent methodologies to ensure compliance in the future."