Beer company, Heineken UK Limited, has been ordered to pay more than £10,000 after it admitted to three breaches of its environmental permit at its Tadcaster Brewery site. The company was fined £500 on each of three charges of breaching its permit, and £800 on failing to notify the Environment Agency of the breach without delay.
Selby Magistrates court heard how faults at the site's plant on 5 August 2008 resulted in 32,600 litres of cider being diverted to the nearby effluent treatment plant. Faults on the system which should have been detected went unnoticed as the company had earlier bypassed the plant's electronic monitoring system. The failure to immediately notify the Environment Agency of the issues with the monitoring system breached the company's permit.
The court also heard that on 8 August 2008, 32,000 litres were lost to the effluent treatment plant when an employee selected the wrong operating mode on a vat full of beer. There were no training materials or written procedures provided to staff on how to operate this system properly, and the Environment Agency wasn't notified of this incident until three days later.
The final breach occurred in 2009, when 11,000 kilogrammes of yeast was diverted to an emergency tank after a pipe worked loose. There was no inspection regime for this piece of equipment, so it was not maintained in good condition.
The company was however given credit for its early guilty plea and the fact that there was no impact on the environment.
Speaking after the case, an Environment Agency spokesman said, "Small breaches in procedure can lead to big environmental impacts. We're lucky on this occasion that there was no pollution, but the rules are there for a reason and, working with the courts, we will ensure that they are upheld."
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