A poultry abattoir in Attleborough, Norfolk has been fined £300,000 for odour pollution after the Environment Agency received nearly 350 complaints from locals in the surrounding area.
Banham Poultry (2018) Ltd. was fined for failing to stop odour pollution from the slaughterhouse, affecting the lives of people living and working in the market town.
People in the Norfolk community were prevented from leaving their homes during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 due to the smell of decaying poultry from the abattoir.
The Environment Agency said that residents in the area described the smell as like ‘rotting bodies and flesh’, and that one person was physically sick.
Poultry abattoir premises
At Chelmsford magistrates’ court on September 15, District judge Andrew King heard the abattoir had broken and damaged doors and walls, a roof so weak it collapsed and another part of the site unsafe for Environment Agency staff to enter.
King acknowledged that the practices at Banham Poultry, now under new management since the offenses occurred, had a “significant effect on quality of life” in the town.
Odours from the abattoir escaped through the broken and damaged structures of the buildings.
The Environment Agency warned the company to act after nine complaints about the slaughterhouse were made early in 2019, coinciding with waste blood kept on site too long.
Believing the company had breached its permit for managing smells, investigators gave Banham Poultry an enforcement notice to limit or prevent odours leaving the boundary of the abattoir.
Sophie Cousins, who led the investigation into the abattoir for the Environment Agency, said: “Banham Poultry failed to invest in odour prevention. People living and working nearby were badly affected over a long period of time.”
“The Environment Agency decided on prosecution after Banham missed many chances to comply with the law. We gave them time and assistance to put matters right, but the problems just mounted up.”
The site’s odour management plan, meant to control the effect of work on the community, was “ripped up”, according to one employee.
Another member of staff wrote in an e-mail in 2019 that they were “embarrassed” and couldn’t defend the company’s poor management of the site.
The company pleaded guilty to failing to keep activities free from odour levels likely to cause pollution outside the abattoir between January 2019 and September 2021.
Banham also admitted to not complying with an enforcement notice served on it by the Environment Agency that provided steps they should have taken to limit odours leaving the site.
District judge King ruled the offences as reckless culpability. He fined Banham Poultry (2018) Ltd., of Station Road, Attleborough, £300,000 for breaches of Environmental Permitting Regulations.
The court also ordered Banham Poultry Ltd. to pay £67,621.45 in costs and a victim surcharge of £170.
