Ten face trial in France over illegal dumping of Belgian waste

The trial of 10 people suspected of operating a vast network trafficking industrial and household waste from Belgium to France began in Lille on Monday.

Members of the I Love My Forest citizens group inspect a site where some 230 tonnes of waste was dumped in Redange, eastern France, on 15 November, 2023. AFP - JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN

Appearing before Interregional Specialised Court (JIRS), the defendants – including five members of the same family – face charges relating to the illegal collection, transport and dumping of waste between 2018 and 2020.

The trial is the result of a civil lawsuit filed by 34 organisations.

It comes after investigators found that some 10,000 tonnes of illegal waste had been transported from a recycling centre in Antwerp and offloaded on public and private land in parts of eastern and northern France.

Rubbish 'hoax'

Olivier Hurault, a lawyer involved in the case, said a group of individuals posing as commercial waste managers were paid as intermediaries to take the sometimes “extremely dangerous” materials from the Antwerp plant after presenting the necessary permits to collect, process and deposit the waste in dedicated locations.

“Under this guise, once they had collected and been paid for taking the waste in Belgium, they simply got rid of it in France,” Hurault said.

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The investigation established that a single intermediary organisation was at the origin of the illegal dumps in dozens of municipalities including the towns of Violaines, in Pas-de-Calais, and Téteghem-Coudekerque-Village, near Dunkirk – as well as further east in the Moselle department.

Some of the waste was deposited at reprocessing centers in France which then filed complaints over false documentation, commercial identity theft and unpaid invoices.

Other rubble and rubbish was dumped on vacant lots near the border.

'Foul smell'

In the town of Rédange, near the Luxembourg border, a pile of household and industrial debris was reportedly left to rot after being dumped at a former steelworks site in 2019, polluting the soil and creating a foul smell.

Rédange mayor Daniel Cimarelli said the entire contents of 35-tonne trucks had been dumped in October of that year.

Meanwhile in Coudekerque Village, elected officials said tons of old clothes and shoes had been abandoned in a shed with high fire risks.

The resulting damage has been estimated at more than €1.5 million.