A large marine paint-making company has been fined £650,000 after a highly toxic banned chemical was washed out from a holding tank into a “pristine” river in south-west England.
International Paint Ltd “utterly failed” to control a substance called TBT that it had stored at its mothballed plant on the banks of the Yealm in Devon, a judge concluded.
An expert who tested water in the Yealm, a site of special scientific interest renowned for its oysters and cockles, found that one sample close to the plant contained 80,000 times the safe level of TBT.
TBT was used in anti-fouling paints for ships to slow the growth of barnacles and algae until it was banned across the globe in the 2000s because it is highly toxic to invertebrate animals. Molluscs are particularly sensitive to it.
International Paint was fined £650,000 and ordered to pay costs of £145,000. The company has agreed to cover costs of remediation works, likely to be at least £500,000.
Sentencing the company, which is owned by the multinational AkzoNobel, recorder Simon Levene said it had stopped using TBT in 2002 and should have cleaned out the tank years ago. He said it was “suspicious” that the discharge happened after the site was put up for sale.
The judge said: “Though I don’t believe anybody directed the TBT should be washed out of the tanks, it is suspicious that the TBT was only discharged when a potential purchaser for whom the presence of TBT in the tanks was a serious problem came along.”
He added: “I am quite satisfied that the defendant, having closed its eyes for years to the problem, operated a reckless system in which it utterly failed to control the management of TBT and other chemicals. I’m satisfied that [a caretaker] emptied the TBT into the estuary and that is something that should never have been allowed to happen.”
The judge, sitting at Plymouth crown court, also raised concerns about what he called “astronomic” levels of mercury that were also found in the river. The Food Standards Agency is to investigate whether this could have got into the human food chain via shellfish.
International Paint Ltd had denied two charges relating to the discharge of hazardous waste from a tank located on the quay at its Newton Ferrers paint testing facility, but was found guilty by a jury.
The court heard that The Environment Agency launched an investigation after the company tried to sell the premises and possible pollution was reported.
International Paint Ltd had run a testing facility on the Yealm at Newton Creek near Newton Ferrers since 1928. The company stopped using TBT in the early 2000s and the site was decommissioned in 2013. But the TBT and other chemicals were not cleared, and in 2016 the caretaker flushed the contents out into the river. The judge said the river had been a “pristine environment” before the incident.
Dr Michael Waldock, an expert whose work led to the banning of TBT, found that nine out of 11 samples exceeded the safe limit for TBT and that, close to the site, one sample contained 80,000 times the safe level. He concluded that the TBT levels were sufficient to have had a major toxic effect on marine life there.
A report presented to the court revealed that data collected in December 2022 showed there had been “little or no reduction in the concentrations of TBT close to the International Paint site … The reservoir of TBT debris is highly persistent and it will continue to release TBT to the sediment for many more years.” However, it did say that the pollution did not appear to have spread widely in the estuary.
International Paint Limited said it took full responsibility for the incident. A spokesperson, Ralph Slikkerveer, said: “We take our environmental obligations very seriously. The company has been in operation for over 120 years and has no prior environmental convictions or cautions.
“We have been working closely with the Marine Management Organisation and are investigating steps to remedy contamination.”
