A soft-drink manufacturer was recently fined by a magistrate's court for leaking a purple, frothy, fruity-smelling discharge into the Wash Dike stream in West Yorkshire.
The manufacturer, Cott Beverages, was fined about us $11,000 and ordered to pay about us $3,700 in costs by Pontefract Magistrates Court. The government's Environment Agency took the company to court after a routine inspection last June found that the stream near Pontefract was darker than usual. After they followed the leak upstream, they discovered it came from the roof of a culvert at the local Cott factory. Investigation revealed that Cott had been dealing with another problem on-site and had turned off its effluent pumps, which backed up and overflowed into a surface water drain and then into the stream.
Cott claims only 500 litres of waste from its drinks-making process was released into the water.
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