Dairy Crest Davidstow Creamery’s multiple pollution breaches

 

 

ELF was contacted by a member of the community living in close proximity to Dairy Crest Davidstow Creamery in Cornwall. This is a site that was prosecuted and fined £1.5m in 2022 by the EA for environmental breaches of their permits, including causing mass mortality to fish in the River Inny. Despite this prosecution, there continue to be environmental breaches, so the community came to ELF wanting to have the plant shut down. Unfortunately, the advice we sought confirmed this was not possible. There are constraints imposed on the EA, which means they cannot close down the plant, nor revoke the permit, as long as the operator is working to address the identified problems.

The community were disappointed as, despite the improvements by the Creamery over the last two years, the record is still very poor. We advised that they could create a public campaign around the company in lieu of legal action. Dairy Crest, owned by the Canadian company Saputo, is a massive supplier of cheese to all supermarkets and creating public pressure may cause changes the law cannot currently coerce.