Environmental Expert Witness Professionals

Phil is a Chartered Waste Manager with over 25 years’ experience in the environment sector, including over 20 years in waste regulation, policy and consultancy. He has provided expert opinion in commercial & insurance disputes and civil & criminal matters since 2010, supported by technical and commercial knowledge and 8 years’ investigation and enforcement experience as a regulator with the Environment Agency. Phil advises both defence and prosecution teams.

Phil has acted as an independent expert in many prosecutions, disputes and in ‘pre-action’ matters, preparing expert reports in compliance with CPR requirements. He has experience in adjudications, arbitration, Crown Court cross-examination, tribunals, libel cases, and joint expert discussions. His criminal expert experience covers illegal waste shipment, illegal waste deposit, permit breaches, statutory duty of care offences, Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) fraud, and Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) matters, from nationally significant cases to matters resolved by Civil Sanctions. Phil’s opinion has supported beneficial outcomes in several cases, including the withdrawal of charges, settlement outcomes, successful adjudication outcomes, and successfully challenging enforcement actions (e.g. from prosecution to enforcement undertaking).

Phil’s expert witness advice is underpinned by experience in providing strategic and operational advice, including waste treatment infrastructure and technology selection and performance; technical, commercial, and regulatory due diligence assessments; regulatory compliance, permitting and good practice; waste infrastructure procurement; and waste facility construction and operations monitoring. Phil’s experience enables him to advise across a comprehensive range of waste types, recovered materials and processing technologies, including mechanical sorting, organic waste recovery, integrated mechanical-biological treatment, secondary raw material production, and energy from waste thermal treatment.

As an Environmental Agency (EA) officer in policy and operational roles, Phil developed an in-depth working knowledge of waste policy and legislation, including through site inspections, audits and enforcement. As prosecuting officer in several cases, notably a complex two-year joint EA-HSE investigation into a nationally significant incident and breaches, Phil gained experience in investigations, statement taking, evidential requirements and PACE procedures, and interviews under caution.

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Mark is a producer responsibility compliance specialist with over 16 years’ experience in the sector. He is a recognised expert in compliance management for producer responsibility schemes and has a deep understanding of producer responsibility legislation from the industry’s perspective. Mark joined Anthesis after 12 years at Ecosurety, a UK multi-regulation compliance scheme, where he had responsibility for compliance management for WEEE, battery and packaging producer responsibility schemes, handling recycling obligations for over 1,000 scheme members.

Mark has a thorough understanding of the technicalities of the producer responsibility laws and how they affect producers placing packaged goods, electronic devices and battery containing products onto the market. He has undertaken impact assessments across numerous new businesses and existing producers to verify that their procedures are compliant and that they are achieving the recycling targets. Mark has represented numerous clients at Environment Agency audits under the WEEE and Packaging Regulations since 2005, helping the regulator to understand the business activities and how the obligations of the producer have been fully met. This has enabled clients to achieve positive audit results and gain reassurance that they have met their obligations.

Mark has also overseen major enforcement undertakings for non-compliant packaging producers, supporting them to become compliant and assisting in the successful approval of the Civil Sanction case by the Environment Agency’s review panel. This has involved evaluating liabilities, calculating avoided costs and additional fees payable for the enforcement undertaking and nominating suitable benefactors. Mark has expertise in helping clients through the bureaucracy of proactive and reactive enforcement undertakings and the process that is necessary to be successful and avoid complex and costly court cases.

Mark’s wider expertise includes developing new take-back systems with logistics operators and producers, allowing them to offset recycling obligations and provide rebates for waste product returns. He has worked closely with Defra, the Environment Agency, industry associations and recyclers to bring coherence, identify common goals, and achieve improvements to the producer responsibility system. This has included through roles as policy lead, industry representative and scheme representative for government working groups on aspects of the WEEE producer responsibility system.

Julian has worked in waste management for almost 40 years. He is an acknowledged and respected expert in the fields of waste policy, strategy, statistical analysis of waste and resource flows, and food waste prevention, management, and the reduction of ‘food losses’ in supply chains. Julian is an experienced expert witness, including preparing a statistical analysis of waste infrastructure commissioning test data at a UK advanced thermal treatment facility with a ‘pre-sort’ materials recycling facility as part of a contractual dispute relating to facility performance.

Whilst at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), Julian established a national reporting system for municipal waste, which resulted in the first series of annual waste statistics reports and was the precursor to the WasteDataFlow reporting system to calculate local authority recycling targets. In 2002, he wrote the influential Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit report “Waste Not Want Not: A Strategy for Tackling the Waste Problem in England”, setting out the issues and suggesting approaches to tackle them and benefit the economy and the environment. Recommendations included significantly increasing landfill tax over the medium term and highlighting the importance of kerbside recycling collections.

In recent years, Julian has played an important role in developing UK and international research into food waste alongside providing expert-level technical advice on food waste management to clients, including major supermarkets. His highly cited paper on food waste in global food supply chains (Royal Society, 2010) foreshadowed the development of UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and to reduce ‘food losses’ along production and supply chains. Julian was a member of the UN Environment Expert Group on SDG Indicator 12.3.1, a Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Inquiry into European food waste prevention policies (“Counting the Cost of Food Waste”, 2014), and provided technical advice to the European Commission on its Food Sustainability Communication. He has been published widely on food waste issues.

Julian also has expertise in Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) performance and reporting. He provided technical advice to Zero Waste Scotland on MRF quality standards, recycling metrics and compositional analysis programmes and has advised WRAP & Zero Waste Scotland on MRF material testing and recycling quality thresholds.

Roberto has over 25 years of international scientific and technical experience in environmental disciplines. His expertise is in contaminated land and environmental due diligence (EDD), having led hundreds of Phase I & II EDD assessments, with emphasis on groundwater resources and contaminated land. He has conducted and managed projects at industrial sites, including in the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, mining, petroleum refineries, waste, and manufacturing (batteries, appliances, automotive, explosives, and metals) sectors. His experience involves soil and groundwater quality investigations and monitoring, remediation project design, and technical expertise in litigation proceedings involving contaminated land and waste management issues.

In an administrative case, Roberto led a technical team supporting a global company in a dispute with the Italian Ministry of the Environment. The Ministry claimed that emergency actions by the company to contain a contamination plume at a manufacturing site were insufficient and needed more extensive interventions. The company disputed this, stating the further remedial actions were unjustified and excessive. Roberto and the technical team used groundwater monitoring data to demonstrate that the emergency containment actions were appropriate to contain the plume and actively reduce the contamination source. As part of the appeal, Roberto assessed the “risk of remedy” intrinsic to the solution requested by the Ministry. The Client won the appeal.

Roberto was appointed as the expert in a criminal case against a pension fund concerning alleged waste mismanagement and abandonment, and resultant soil and surface water contamination. He led a technical team to reconstruct responsibilities, assess the extent and impact of contamination, and develop a cost estimate for disposal and clean-up. Roberto was also the nominated defence technical expert in proceedings concerning hazardous waste mismanagement and its impacts on surface and groundwater. He developed and executed an investigation, including sampling & analysis of waste stockpiles, soils, sediments, surface and groundwater and the analysis of soil and groundwater quality data. He prepared a remediation plan based on a Human Health Risk Assessment, which was approved by the administrative local authorities.

Roberto was also appointed in a civil case involving groundwater contamination at a chemical distribution warehouse site. Anthesis reviewed the appeal documentation and concluded that the appellant’s case did not prove the causal relationship between site activities and groundwater contamination beyond any reasonable doubt.