I am continuing to shoot locations for my extended body of work ‘Edgelands’. Most if not all of the sites that I find to photograph have had their post-war industrial function erased leaving just scars in the landscape yet somehow nature prevails. Such is the way of the natural world.

What amazes me is the extent to which fly-tipping takes place at these locations. Last year when I was photographing the sugar beet silos at Sproughton in the dying embers of a late winter sun, white van man arrived several times to deposit the effluent of his small building job that day. There was I with step ladders and camera hoisted 8 feet off the ground and still they continued in their illicit activities. Many of these sites have what I call ‘anti-traveller’ bulwarks of rubble deposited around their perimeters. These act as a magnet for tippers as shit does to flies.

Fly-tipping has always gone on but I was on the team that implemented Landfill Tax. That was the first ‘green tax’ introduced by a government in this country, if you exclude Air Passenger Duty that is. APD was an attempt to secure a tax based on carbon usage of aviation fuel but levied on the passengers rather than the airlines. APD does not touch most people in this country yet Landfill Tax does. At the time, before Landfill Tax was implemented there was a school of thought that posited the fact that fly-tipping would increase proportionally with the escalation of the tax to the full designed rate. I believe that to be so. Landfill Tax reached its designed maximum rate in 2014 on a ‘duty escalator’.

We pay our poll tax locally and our waste disposal services are covered by this and local refuse sites exist where, just as in our council provided wheelie bins, we have to segregate our different waste into particular skips. God forbid you put something in the wrong bin. The queues to get into these places can be almost as long as passengers waiting for Eurostar trains at St Pancras at times of stress. Since the service of providing municipal tips has been outsourced to private contractors, there always seems to be a veritable platoon of staff wearing day-glow vests keeping an eagle eye on citizens doing the right thing by taking refuse to a site. Restricted opening hours and impositions on small traders only exacerbate the situation and the layers of bureaucracy that now weigh heavily on small business owners is such that I can see why they go about dumping illicitly.

This image is one that speaks volumes.

It seems that the powers that be neither know their left from their right when placing heaps of rubble around derelict sites.

Actions do speak louder than words.