Sepa: the sleeping watchdog

Sunday Herald, 24 July 2011
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/transport-environment/sepa-the-sleeping-watchdog-1.1113711

The agency that’s supposed to protect us from harmful pollution ignored figures which suggested Scotland had been exposed to horrific levels of lethal poison EXCLUSIVE: By environment editor Rob Edwards

A government database meant to ensure that people and the environment are not poisoned by pollution is so riddled with flaws it is unfit for purpose, the Sunday Herald can reveal. 

An investigation has uncovered an alarming litany of major errors in official figures of toxic emissions from Scotland’s industrial plants. Some emissions are recorded as being thousands or even millions of times too high – which, if true, would have presaged environmental disasters – and have gone unnoticed on the official record for a year or more.

Experts claim the Scottish Government figures are so unreliable they could also conceal massive under-estimates of hazardous pollution caused by businesses. This, they say, undermines public trust in Scotland’s entire pollution protection regime.

Politicians and environmental groups, shocked by the mistakes that have been admitted, are this weekend demanding that the Scottish Pollution Release Inventory, run for the Government by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), must be reviewed and overhauled.

“Questions have to be asked about why so many errors have been made in reporting discharges but were not noticed,” said Sarah Boyack MSP, Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Secretary for the Environment and a former environment minister.

“The levels are eye watering and should surely have prompted proper checks before now. Sepa is our environmental guardian, so for no-one to notice that companies’ figures for dangerous chemicals were out by a factor of 1000 or more is simply not acceptable.”

Last week Sepa withdrew seven pollution entries from the online inventory after the Sunday Herald queried them. There was a “strong possibility” that they were wrong, the public watchdog said.

Sepa accepted that some of the mistakes should have been picked up by internal checks, and it has launched an investigation into how they had been missed. “It’s always disappointing when there are errors in data that we publish and we will use the problems identified by the Sunday Herald to further improve the way we check the data submitted by operators,” said Sepa’s head of environmental quality, Martin Marsden.

Sepa is also planning to correct pollution figures from 100 sites submitted to the European Commission for 2007, 2008 and 2009, though it says 70 of these are due to changes in the method of calculating emissions rather than actual errors. 
Perhaps the worst of the blunders admitted by Sepa was a reported emission of dioxins, a group of highly dangerous and persistent chemicals known to affect the immune system and cause cancer. According to Sepa’s inventory, Tarbolton Moss landfill site in South Ayrshire released 29.3 kg of the toxins into the air in 2009.

That is 100 times more than all the annual dioxin emissions from all the industrial plants in the UK. It amounts to as much as a seventh of all the dioxins dropped by the US during the Vietnam war as Agent Orange, which is blamed for killing or maiming 400,000 Vietnamese and giving 500,000 children birth defects.

Yet the Tarbolton figure remained unremarked on Sepa’s inventory until the Sunday Herald highlighted it last week. It has now been removed because Sepa agreed it “may be incorrect”.


A second high dioxin emission recorded as coming from a paper mill run by the Finnish company, UPM-Kymmene, near Irvine in 2009 was also admitted by Sepa and the company to have been “incorrectly calculated by using the wrong factor to convert from nanograms to kilograms”. The correct figure, they said, was nearly 1500 times lower than the reported level.

Dr Richard Dixon, the director of environmental campaign group WWF Scotland, argued that the proliferation of errors threw the value of the pollution inventory into doubt. 

“A landfill site claiming to have released 100 times the total UK emissions of one of the most toxic substances known to man should have set huge alarm bells ringing,” he said.

“Instead it was apparently accepted without question. Sepa clearly needs major changes to the way it checks the data that comes in from companies, but it also needs to go back and check every item in the register if people are to trust it in future.”

According to Dixon, the most worrying aspect was the potential for undetected under-estimates. “If companies can accidentally over-report by a factor of a million, there may be other companies who are deliberately getting away with under-reporting on a grand scale,” he warned.

Another big error was in the reported heavy metal pollution from a waste plant run by Healthcare Environment Services at Shotts in Lanarkshire. The company’s managing director, Garry Pettigrew, told the Sunday Herald that the firm had made a “huge mistake” in reporting its emissions to Sepa. 

The amount of nickel the company originally said it poured into the drains in 2009 was 2.9 million times too high. Similarly, figures for zinc were 2.5 million times too high, for cadmium nearly half a million times too high, and for copper 124,000 times too high. “We made a hash of the calculations,” said Pettigrew.

The Canadian oil company, Talisman, said that a recorded discharge of 116kg of the highly toxic metal, mercury, into the sea from its terminal at Flotta in Orkney in 2004 was a typographical error. The actual discharge was 0.038kg, 3000 times lower. 

The German company, BASF, said that a misplaced decimal point had made a discharge of mercury from its pigments factory in Paisley, reported by a previous owner in 2007, seem 100 times too high. “Sepa,” commented a company spokesman, “obviously didn’t worry about it.”

Two other figures showing high levels of pollution from local authority landfill sites in North Lanarkshire and Fife were withdrawn by Sepa last week (see separate table). In addition, the watchdog accepted that pollution figures for the years prior to 2007 were unreliable.

Sepa has now posted a new warning on the front page of its pollution inventory website, stating: “The pre-2007 data have not been audited in their entirety by Sepa and may contain errors,” it said.

Professor Andrew Watterson, head of the occupational and environmental health research group at the University of Stirling, described inaccuracies in the inventory as “a major cause for concern that requires urgent action”. Flawed data seriously hampered research into possible health problems, he argued.

“Where errors might relate to under-estimates from companies, and will be difficult to pick up so easily as over-estimates, this may present potentially serious longer-term health risks to communities which could continue undetected and unremediated,” he warned.

“Some companies making the returns do not appear to have checked their entries carefully and, if recording is so slipshod, there could be serious pollution problems not being picked up.”


SEPA said it was still confident that the “vast majority” of the pollution data published since 2007 was accurate. In 2009 its Scottish Pollution Release Inventory logged emissions of 215 pollutants from 1323 industrial sites across the country.

The watchdog said it had greatly improved its process for checking the figures submitted by companies in recent years, but accepted that it had failed to spot some of the errors. “We have to do this over large numbers of sites and a wide range of different pollutants and it is not possible to identify all the possible mistakes,” said a statement from Sepa.

The agency also pointed out that the inventory was a reporting requirement, not a regulatory tool. It used a range of other means, such as inspections and prosecutions, to ensure that pollution did not damage the environment or endanger human health.

“The inventory aims to provide a very valuable picture of the level of pollutants released in Scotland,” added Sepa’s Martin Marsden. “We have put significant effort into making this information accessible to the public and we would urge people to use it.”

The Scottish Government said that Sepa was committed to providing accurate information on pollution. “Quite rightly, Sepa is continually improving what is a very complex process to ensure all future data is as robust and accurate as possible,” said a Government spokeswoman.

But that is unlikely to provide comfort to those alarmed by the extent of the errors uncovered. 

“We rely on this kind of information for our campaigning work, and we have to trust that it is correct,” said Stan Blackley, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland. 

“These revelations raise doubts about the reliability of that information, particularly when the differences between the actual pollution discharges and what has been recorded appear to be many thousands of times out in some cases.”

Blackley called on Sepa to review the pollution release inventory. 

“One particularly worrying aspect here is that we now can’t be completely sure that Sepa hasn’t missed or misrecorded a major discharge of pollution somewhere in Scotland,” he said.