Cameras used to track down people illegally dumping waste in Werribee

A sting operation to catch people stealthily dumping waste in a quiet Werribee street is getting results with one business fined almost $2000. Here’s how it works.

A Werribee-based lawn mowing contractor has been fined for dumping green waste in a suburban street.

Surveillance cameras have been used to nab a lawn mowing contractor who dumped a truckload of garden waste in a Werribee street.

Footage from the cameras in Tariff Court showed a tip-truck dumping the waste and driving off.

The Werribee-based contractor has been slapped with a $1934 fine by the Environment Protection Authority as part of a joint surveillance operation with Wyndham Council targeting the notorious illegal dumping spot.

The council’s director city operations Stephen Thorpe said dumping in Tariff Court, an industrial estate, had been “creating a nuisance to the community and a hazard to the local environment”.

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“Illegal dumping is effectively an attempt to dump the cost of the clean-up on the council and our community and that is not acceptable,” he said.

EPA regional manager metropolitan Daniel Hunt said illegal dumping often cost the offender far more than doing the right thing.

“In this case, the fine from EPA is 10 times the cost of disposing of a truckload of green waste properly,” he said.

“You only have to be caught once for illegal dumping to become a very expensive exercise.”

Wyndham is one of 13 council across Victoria which has an EPA officer working in-house to protect the local environment.

Mr Hunt said the program gave the council better access to the EPA’s investigation capabilities and reduced response time to reports of noise, odour, dust, waste dumping, litter and water pollution.

You can report illegal dumping and other types of pollution by calling the EPA’s 24-hour hotline on 1300 EPA VIC (1300 372 842).