ENTREPRENEUR Martin Montague is a man on a mission – to rid the nation of the scourge of fly tipping – and he’s invested a cool £250,000 of his own money to do it.
After waiting in vain for local councils to step up to the challenge of waste crime, he created a free app called ClearWaste.com on which members of the public can report rubbish dumped illegally anywhere in the UK. This links automatically to every local authority in the council, allowing them to build a database of dumping hotspots, establish patterns and hopefully catch the criminals.
“If people find fly-tipped stuff they just take a picture with the app, put in a few details and a report will instantly be sent to the local council,” Martin explained. “It’s hooked into every local authority in the country.
“There’s no need to go to council websites and find the right place to report it to or phone a helpline and sit waiting in a queue for your call to be answered. You don’t even need to know where you are as you can use your location settings on your phone to do that automatically if you want to. Hopefully, given time, the statistics will help councils predict where fly-tippers operate.”
Now Martin is calling on skip hire and waste firms to join the fight. “The app is currently live and free from the Apple and Google Play stores,” he explained. “But shortly we will be adding a price comparison element.
“We are looking for skip and waste businesses to register,
allowing the customer to access an in-built directory of legitimate companies
they can trust. We simply vet the companies against the Environment Agency
lists to make sure they are upper tier registered and then they are visible to
any customer through our app. Registration is completely free of charge.”
A social media advert for ClearWaste starring actor John Challis (Boycie in Only Fools and Horses), Emily Head (Carli in The Inbetweeners) and Frankie Oatway, from the Discovery series Strippers: Cars for Cash, has just been filmed.
“Fly tipping is bad for the environment, can be fatal to wildlife and costs councils thousands and thousands of pounds to clean-up, money that could be better spent on things like schools or care for the elderly,” concluded Martin. “So the more people’s hands we can put the app into the better. Down the line, I’ve got some ideas for potential revenue streams but the main core focus of the app – to help stop fly-tipping – will always be free.”
You can register your skip hire or waste processing business at: www.clearwaste.com