Alongside a difficult market, operators in the metals recycling industry are facing two challenges not of their making, metal theft and fires. BMRA is working hard to address the route cause of both of these issues, but we need your help.
We need data to help us form our arguments for action both around theft from members' yards and fires being experienced by operators.
Metal Theft
Even before the Scrap Metal Dealers Act was implemented in 2013, we said that it will only be effective as long as it was enforced. And, for a couple of years, it was. But then prices dropped off, metal theft became less attractive, so numbers dropped off and any funding for targeted enforcement was pulled. From FOIs and conversations with stakeholders, it seems all knowledge of the Act has practically disappeared from the minds of the enforcers.
As a result, a substantial number of operators, knowing there was no enforcement, dropped out of the licensing regime thus opening up a route for the stolen metal to be sold and processed.
It is no surprise that we are once again seeing metal theft on the rise: £100k of power cable stolen from the railway in December; £50k of national grid cable in January; and this month, 1,000s of households in a Huntingdonshire town lost broadband and the theft of signalling cable brought Greater Anglia trains to a halt. We know that members are being targeted too – likely by organised crime groups - but we need to know so we can show that we are victims of metal theft too. The data we are seeking is as follows:
- Date and time of theft
- Site where theft occurred
- What and how much was stolen
- How the thieves accessed the site and/or building
- If the thieves left anything behind
- If the theft was caught on CCTV
- Whether the crime was reported to the police and if they attended
- If reported, the crime reference number
- Please indicate if we can share your theft data.
Fires
While the number of reported fires caused by lithium-ion batteries last year across the waste industry hit 1,200 we know the real number is harder to quantify. To make our case for Government introducing a kerbside collection of WEEE and orphan batteries, running a public awareness campaign and ensure better oversight at HWRCs, we again need data from members. The data we are seeking is as follows:
- Date of fire
- Site where fire occurred
- If it occurred in operational hours
- How the fire was detected/system used
- Location of fire on site
- Size of fire (tonnage affected)
- Time fire was active
- If the fire service attended
- Cost of fire.
We would like to share the theft data with our partners attached to the National Infrastructure Crime Partnership so it can be added to a heat map so they can track organised crime group activity. However, if you would rather not, we will respect your confidence and add the data to an anonymised list.
If you have any concerns about supplying either sets of data, please speak to Antonia Grey, otherwise please send the data to: [email protected].