Viridor

Viridor calls itself "one of the UK's leading resource and waste management companies".

Viridor and South West Water are subsidiaries of the Pennon Group.

Controversies

Viridor operates waste incinerators, amongst its other activities. In 2009 a former employee at Viridor's Raikes Lane, Bolton incinerator, Patrick Sudlow (though he was not an employee while Viridor owned the incinerator), claimed that pollution monitoring records at the incinerator were falsified to cover up poor performance. An article in the South Wales Echo of May 6 reported:

Mr Sudlow’s claims emerged as Viridor’s controversial plans for an incinerator to burn 350,000 tonnes of waste a year in the Splott ward of the capital were being discussed today at the city council’s planning committee.

According to a report in ENDS: A culture of poor management, he [Sudlow] said, has seen routine falsification of pollution-monitoring records and logbook data, illicit effluent discharges to sewer and engineering problems which have endangered the health of operators. The malpractice, he said, has escaped the Environment Agency’s attention.

According to the article in the South Wales Echo, a spokesman for Viridor said the company had only taken over management of the facility, which disposes of waste in Greater Manchester, in the last month. Therefore Sudlow was not an employee at the incinerator during the company's ownership. The spokesman said the allegations “appear to be based on nothing more than individual perceptions from a disgruntled former employee”.

A letter from Dan Cooke, External Affairs Manager at Viridor, published in the South Wales Echo on May 8 2009 said:

The site referred to in Bolton has been within Viridor’s ownership for just four weeks. Mr Sudlow left the site in March 2008, therefore was never an employee of Viridor and therefore his unfounded allegations concerning site safety and pollution-monitoring records do not relate to Viridor’s ownership or operation of the site.

Sudlow's concerns regarding Viridor, however, appear to hinge around his claim that he contacted Viridor to discuss the problems with the incinerator but received no response. In other words, there is no evidence that Viridor has addressed and solved the problems.