In cooperation with Europol, the Guardia Civil have cracked a racket involving 5,700 tonnes of plastic waste through 141 site inspections.

The problem of plastic-waste disposal attracts a growing number of criminals owing to it being difficult to detect fraud and because the judicial retribution is ridiculously light.

In other words, even if they do get caught, they’ll just get fines, at the most.

In the province of León for example, they came across a company that had secretly collected a great quantity of plastic waste, which had come from other areas of Spain, with the intention of simply dumping or burning it. Obviously, they had been paid to dispose of it the proper way.

Another company in Jaén had set up shop stripping plastic from scrapped cars and then exporting it as ‘prime material’ abroad. They had shipped 900 tonnes to Thailand, 98 tonnes to Hong Kong, 312 tonnes to Malaysia and 2,302 tonnes to Morocco.

(News: Spain)