Wyong: EBH Environmental Services and Transport pleads guilty to falsifying records and illegal waste movements

A company director told the environmental watchdog he dug himself “deeper than I would have ever wanted” as he falsified documents trying to truck contaminated fill to Queensland.

EBH Environmental Transport & Services at Berkeley Vale and Wyong. Picture: EBH/Facebook

A prominent Central Coast waste services company has pleaded guilty to eight counts of breaching environmental laws trying to fulfil a contract to truck contaminated fill from a Sydney building site to Queensland.

EBH Environmental Services and its affiliated entity EBH Environmental Transport faced Wyong Local Court on Wednesday where a lawyer acting for the company entered guilty pleas to eight offences.

These included four counts of supplying false or misleading information about waste, three counts of transferring waste to an unlawful facility and one count of using a place as a waste facility without authority.

An agreed set of facts states EBH was contracted by Western Earthmoving to remove contaminated fill from a new housing estate on the outskirts of western Sydney and truck it to a landfill site in Queensland.

Western Earthmoving was building roads, stormwater and drainage at the new housing estate at Silverdale, near Warragamba, when it uncovered material contaminated with silty clay, animal bone matter and fibro asbestos sheeting, which was consistent with the site’s former use as a wildlife park.

EBH Environmental Services' Berkeley Vale site. Picture: Google

EBH quoted for the job in May 2021 and transported the waste from the site on June 8, 2021, consisting of 375.34 tonnes, June 25 (517.56 tonnes) and June 26 (144.76 tonnes).

The facts state EBH illegally transported the 1037.66 tonnes of waste to its Wyong facility, which isn’t licenced to accept asbestos.

EBH’s Berkeley Vale site. Picture: EBH/Facebook

Throughout July, Western Earthmoving began pressuring EBH’s director David Burgun for disposal dockets proving the waste had been disposed of legally at the Queensland facility.

Western Earthmoving needed the dockets to prove to the developer the site was asbestos free and to get paid.

Mr Burgun then falsely drafted 28 disposal dockets in Microsoft Word purportedly from the Queensland landfill site stating the waste had been lawfully received.

He also invoiced Western Earthmoving nearly $234,000.

EBH’s director described falsifying disposal dockets as a ‘bad business decision’. Picture: EBH/Facebook

But Mr Burgun came undone when the developer contacted the Queensland landfill site for a due diligence check only to learn the waste had never arrived and the disposal dockets turned out to be fakes.

In August, the Queensland landfill site agreed to take the material, which had been sitting at EBH’s Wyong facility.

Meanwhile Mr Burgun had also been falsifying EBH’s waste contribution monthly reports to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA).

The EPA was told of the false disposal dockets by the Queensland landfill site and commenced an investigation.

Two years later, EPA investigators brought Mr Burgun in for a ‘please explain’ interview in which he made full admissions.

“It was a bad business decision,” he told EPA officers.

“In the minds of Western Earthmoving their job had to proceed forward. I regrettably, now regrettably wished that I had never helped Western Earthmoving.

“I got myself into a pickle. You know, I got myself in deeper than what I would have ever wanted.”

The facts outlined EBH’s previous record, which included four $15,000 fines but no previous court prosecutions.

The fines were for turbid water discharging from its Berkeley Vale premises in February 2017, unlawful storage of 3100 tonnes of aggregate material at Berkeley Vale in March 2017, over height stockpiles in January 2020 and unlawful storage of 15.3 tonnes of asbestos in June 2021.

EBH will be sentenced on March 20.