With wide implications for the waste industry, the Court of Appeal ruled that landfill tax should not be paid on recycled aggregates and fine material used to construct roads and cover the tip at the company's Sheffield site.
Lord Justice Aldous said that in his judgement, “the tax is a landfill tax, not a landfill and recycling tax.”
The material in question had been obtained for use on the site by Sheffield city council's highways department. It was sorted and recycled by an intermediary company, of which both the council and Viridor had stakes, before being sold on the open market. The waste management company's position was that the material was not being disposed of as waste.
Viridor's legal advisers said that there had been some pressure on the Court of Appeal to provide a boost to the landfill tax that waste companies pay by throwing out the appeal.
Mike Morris, senior solicitor at Nabarro Nathanson, said: “The court could have found reasons to protect tax revenues but instead rightly looked at the environmental drivers which lay behind the interpretation of landfill tax, such as the promotion of waste recycling.”
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