WORK to clear a giant waste mound that has blighted Brierley Hill for the last few years has finally been completed at a cost of £2million.

At its height in 2012 the huge pile of household rubbish awaiting landfill topped out at about 40-feet.

The pile on the old Refuse Derived Fuel site off Moor Street put the town on the international map for all the wrong reasons and cost former RDF director Robert McNaughton a six-month spell behind bars as he failed to clear the mound within agreed timescales after the Environment Agency took him to court.

But the Environment Agency announced today (Thursday November 3) that work on the site has now been completed and Marc Lidderth, the EA’s environment manager for the West Midlands, said: “It’s fantastic news for the local community that we’re here today and all the waste has gone.

“Once we’d exhausted all the legal action we could take the next step was to work with the landowner to get them to take on responsibility to clear the site “They understood their responsibility and ultimately they’ve cleared the site at their own expense – at no cost to the taxpayer. It’s a real success story and a great outcome.”

The waste mountain had been a blot on the landscape for residents living nearby for more than four years and the clear-up, which has been going on since January, has cost landowner John Kelly an eye-watering £2million.

Alistair Hilditch-Brown, operations manager for Broad Environmental which carried out the work to clear the site, said: “Waste abandonment is a big issue across the UK. It’s an important lesson to landowners to be very vigilant about who they lease their land to.”

Dudley Council planners last year approved outline plans for 94 new apartments to be built on the site and Brierley Hill councillor Rachel Harris is keen to see such a scheme come to fruition soon.

She said: "Instead of that huge waste pile, which made us the waste centre of Europe, it's a great regeneration site within a stone's throw of the town centre."
Cllr Harris said it was "absolutely brilliant" to see the rubbish mound gone for good and she added: "It's a great example of how local people got the agencies to listen and work with them."