Pollution crackdown on dirtiest factories

The Government's pollution inspectorate is poised to begin fine-tooth comb inspections of some of Britain's most polluting chemical plants and factories.

Teams of inspectors will spend up to four days poking around sites, talking to managers and employees, measuring emissions and examining manufacturing processes in detail to see if companies are complying with pollution limits.

Dr David Slater, director of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Pollution, said they would be the most intensive inspections ever carried out by the organisation, using selected teams of inspectors. They would supplement the 10,000 routine visits it carries out each year to smelters, refineries, power stations, incinerators and manufacturing plants.

The first two plants involved are BP Chemicals in Hull and ICI Chemicals and Polymers at Runcorn, Cheshire, two of the largest such sites in the country. The inspectorate plans to use its visits to work out the best way of carrying out such in-depth inspections.

There will be one more such visit before April 1996, when the pollution inspectorate is merged into the Government's new environment agency for England and Wales. But Dr Slater, who is expected to take a senior director's post in the new agency, said he envisaged the special inspections continuing. They could be sprung on polluters unannounced, "in certain circumstances".

Blake Holt of BP Chemicals at Hull said the company had agreed to co- operate in being the first site to be examined. "But I don't imagine for a moment it's going to be easy. The standards imposed on us are getting increasingly demanding." The site employs 1,300 people on the north bank of the Humber estuary making more than 1 million tons a year of basic industrial chemicals such as solvents, ammonia and acetic acid.

BP says that last year it produced 43,962 tons of pollution and waste, a 5.8 per cent cut on the 1992 figure. Most of it went into the sea or air and the plant's single largest pollutant was carbon monoxide gas, lethal in a confined space but harmless at low concentrations.

The main task of the inspectorate's 430 staff is to introduce and enforce a complex regime known as Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) in more than 1,000 of the most polluting industrial premises in England and Wales. IPC is intended to minimise the overall burden of air, water and soil pollution without imposing excessive costs. Under it, the inspectorate sets each firm maximum limits for the quantity of pollution produced and also authorises details of the manufacturing process, and the way it is managed. The new in-depth inspections will be the most exhaustive tests of compliance with IPC.

Publishing the inspectorate's annual report yesterday, Dr Slater said several studies had proved that often minor alterations in the way things were done could save hundreds of millions of pounds each year, cutting waste and pollution at the same time.

A joint study between the inspectorate and Allied Colloids in Bradford, a company with a poor environmental record, showed that up to pounds 300,000 a year could be saved through investing about pounds 100,000 in changes and new equipment. The company said yesterday that the study had been very worthwhile but the savings still had to be proved.