National waste crime survey 2025: summary
Published 23 July 2025
Applies to England
© Crown copyright 2025
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1. Chief Scientist’s Group report summary
Waste crime includes dumping or burning waste, illegally shipping waste abroad, deliberately mis-describing waste (either to evade landfill tax or avoid the correct management required) and operating illegal waste sites. Illegal management of waste damages the environment and causes harm to local communities. This is in addition to the impact to the waste industry, as illegal practises undercut legitimate businesses.
2. The survey
The Environment Agency uses a National Waste Crime Survey to gather insights from the waste industry and potential victims of waste crime. This provides information on the nature and the scale of waste crime, as well as how the Environment Agency is perceived in tackling it.
Members of the waste industry, landowners and farmers and service providers are invited to complete the survey anonymously online. Therefore, the respondents are a self-selecting group, focussing on their own experiences of waste crime.
The first survey was run in a pilot in 2020, with repeat iterations run in 2021 and 2023. The results of the fourth survey are shared here, summarising the experience of 764 respondents, and illustrate the persistent scale of waste crime in 2025.
3. Results
Waste industry respondents estimated that an average 20% of all waste may be illegally managed. The financial consequences of waste crime continue to be high; criminals are thought to be motivated to misdescribe waste to avoid regulations and evade landfill tax meanwhile landowners and the waste industry suffer the impacts through harm to their businesses and the financial costs of clean up. However, the survey also reveals, that despite a small increase on previous years, only 27% of all waste crimes are reported. Few respondents felt that the Environment Agency is effectively resourced to deter waste crime.
Looking across the results of the previous iterations of the National Waste Crime Survey allows emerging trends to be observed. The proportion of respondents who felt there had been an increase in waste crime over the previous 12 months fell with each survey up to 2025. However, for fly tipping, this changed in 2025, where a higher proportion of respondents felt that it had increased.
The findings will be used to inform the Environment Agency’s strategic approach to tackling waste crime.