Illegally buried waste can now be discovered by a specialist scanner without the need to dig up the ground, according to the UK's environment watchdog.

The UK Environment Agency said the technology would speed up and make easier the hunt for criminal polluters and getting them pay for proper cleanup of their waste.

The scanner uses electrical currents to create an underground map of an area. “If something has been buried in the ground and it's a significant volume of material, [then] if the site isn't licensed or hasn't had a licence in the past, then it's clearly not a legal landfill,” said John Burns, a project manager in the national enforcement team at the Environment Agency.

The scanner has already led inspectors to a large area of buried waste in the New Forest National Park, in the south of England, they estimate could cost around GBP500,000 to clean up. That cost will now be passed on to the landowner who illegally dumped the waste there.

In the past two years, the agency has shut down around 1,500 illegal waste sites, with fines for polluters shooting up from GBP1.4m in 2003 to GBP3m last year. Inspectors believe, however, that around 800 illegal sites are still in operation.

“In the main it tends to be, in terms of landfilling, construction and demolition waste and some tyres,” said Burns. “In terms of the illegal dumping or depositing, it's quite often scrap and other materials like that which aren't very cheap to dispose of by legitimate means.”

Illegally dumped waste can have serious environmental consequences. “If someone decides they're going to deposit a load of oily waste or a load of waste containing paints or spirits or cleaning materials, it could cause ground or surface water pollution and that can be quite serious. If a pollutant gets into the groundwater, it can take a long time to get it out and it's a very expensive process.”

The agency's scanners use a technique known as resistive tomography where electrodes are inserted into the ground at regular intervals and an electrical current is passed between them. Because different materials respond to the current in different ways, the scanner can build up a picture of whatever is underground. “You can plot out a relatively large area in a day or two. The advantage is that it's non-invasive — you don't have to bring machines on to a site and have to start digging it up,” said Burns.

Paul Leinster, chief executive of the agency, said “By dumping waste illegally, waste criminals avoid landfill charges and undercut legitimate waste businesses, but more importantly they put the environment and human health at risk.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service