Squinting through her car headlights in the early dawn, it looked like some sort of surrealist horror. Weighing just short of 30 tonnes, the enormous pile of rubbish had appeared on Elaine Hutchings’ doorstep in Lichfield overnight. “The road was carnage,” she says. The smell of mildew was nauseating. Granted, Hutchings is only 5ft (1.52 metres) tall – but the heap loomed over her. “I just stood there in shock.”

Discernible among the bricks and rubble were toilet seats, office chairs, school exam papers from 15 years ago and, somehow compounding the absurdity of it all, a single hairdryer. “Nothing would surprise me as to what was in there,” says the 54-year-old business director. “It could have cost someone their life. I was so upset that somebody would even consider doing that without a thought for anybody.”

On the night of 19 January, two lorries dumped what is likely to be the largest mound of fly-tipped rubbish to grace a UK public road in recent years on Watery Lane. The waste firm drafted in to claw up the 15m-long pile with diggers said it was its largest clean-up job in 30 years. Nearby businesses lost two days’ trade while the road was cleared. It cost the council just short of £10,000.

“Lichfield’s a small city, so this kind of thing is big news,” says Iain Wilkinson, 43, a university worker. “I’m quite shocked that they actually managed to perpetrate a crime like that on such a scale, because this looks like it’s been heavily premeditated. It almost seems like a gesture of sorts …” Suspicion in the city is still rife. “It makes you wonder whether there was some kind of revenge or something,” says Karen Vanderlinde, 49, who works for the department of health. “Customers are wondering whether it’s malicious,” says Katie Barton, the general manager of local cafe Thyme Kitchen, which was forced to close. “I don’t understand the thought process behind it. It’s very, very odd.”

But who was behind this mountain of garbage? It’s a question that local environmental health officers are investigating with vigour. “This is what the guys who do this work live for. It’s like solving a murder,” says the council’s regulation and enforcement manager, James Johnson.

Large-scale fly-tipping is rising in Britain. In England alone, incidents handled by local authorities that were of “tipper lorry load” size increased by 13% between 2021-22 and 2022-23, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. “The number of instances of fly-tipping is about the same as the previous year, but the quantities are greater,” says Allison Ogden Nash, the CEO of environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. The annual cost of clearing these mammoth rubbish tips was £13.2m – an increase of 23% on the previous year’s £10.7m.

That’s nothing compared with the emotional toll. “It absolutely rips your heart out,” says 70-year-old football manager John Elliott, who last month woke up to six lorry-loads of mattresses, sinks and broken garden fencing that had been fly-tipped in the car park of his club, Oxhey Jets FC, in Watford. It cost the local council about £15,000 to clear it. “This football club has been my life – I built it from the ground up. To have somebody do that to you when you’re scraping the barrel trying to survive, it makes you feel so angry and sick.” The day after the first load was dumped, the perpetrators came back, broke the newly repaired locks, and did it again.

A lot of waste crimes happen in plain sight. By law, waste removal businesses must be registered, but on Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace, thousands of unregistered operations offer cheap removals that will probably end with loads being dumped on public roads or private land, with farmers disproportionately bearing the brunt. Some have complained of having to turn their land into “medieval forts” to ward off the problem, as they’re liable for the cost of removing any rubbish. In England, waste companies that do register with the Environment Agency require no vetting beyond an online form and the £154 fee. (Fed up with lax regulation, one environmental consultant registered Oscar, his dead west highland terrier, as a waste carrier in 2017.)

“The system has created opportunities for people to save or make money through fly-tipping,” says Hervé Borrion, a professor of crime science at UCL. And there is much money to be made: many believe the much-cited figure that waste crime costs the English economy alone £1bn a year is a conservative estimate. “It’s a very high-reward, low-risk crime. You can get £2,000 for one load of waste,” says Sam Corp, head of regulation at the Environmental Services Association. “And even if you do get caught, the penalties aren’t high enough to be a sufficient deterrent. It’s deemed to be a business expense by many criminals.” As Ogden Nash points out, the average fine for any fly-tipper who makes it to court is £526, “a slap on the wrist compared to how much they’ve probably made, plus the thousands it’s cost the local authority to take it to prosecution”. As for landfill tax evasion – a separate offence – no one has been prosecuted in the 29 years since the tax was introduced in 1996.

In Lichfield, Johnson shows me the camo-print cameras his team have stealthily planted at fly-tipping hotspots across the city. “You can put one up a tree!” he says. “Guess how much?” he challenges. £700? “Less than £100! We’ve caught people with this. It’s really effective.” Unfortunately, there was not one up a tree or elsewhere on Watery Lane the night of the fly-tip. Cracking this case may come down to less hi-tech methods: most fly-tippers fail to remove identifying information from the documents they dump amid the builder’s rubble and other garbage.

In areas such as Birmingham and Bristol, talk of reducing bin collections – to once a fortnight in the former, and to every four weeks in the latter – has left residents worried that things can only get worse. “It’s a constant menace,” says Adrian Collins, a parish councillor in Frenchay, a small village on the edge of Bristol, which has been plagued by fly-tipping in recent weeks. “I would say that fly-tipping used to happen here every couple of months or six weeks – now it’s happening almost weekly. If the plans are rolled out to collect black bins once a month, that could turn the uptick we’ve experienced in the last month into a permanent occurrence.”

Of course, not all fly-tipping is the work of complex criminal networks. For those without a car, or those without a computer to book a slot at their local recycling centre, or those unable to pay their council’s collection fee, getting rid of household waste can be a logistical nightmare. “Here, the council charges £50 for the removal of three items,” says Bradford-based photographer Neil Terry, who has been documenting his area’s worsening rubbish problem as the city centre gets a facelift for city of culture 2025. “Most people, frankly, can’t afford that. It’s no wonder that it ends up on the pavement.”

At least local authorities are getting better at laying down the law: the number of enforcement actions brought against perpetrators was up 5% in 2022-23 compared with the previous year in England (though the number of fixed-penalty notices was down by a quarter). Greater investment from central government could be well worth it: Corp points to 2014 research that every £1 spent on tackling waste crime yields almost £5 in return. “The money allocated to the Environment Agency to tackle fly-tipping pales in comparison to the cost,” he says.

As for Lichfield, the road has been cleared, businesses are back open, and Johnson’s investigators are on the warpath. “They’re currently out there working 10- to 12-hour days,” says Johnson. Doors are being knocked on, doorbell cameras are being searched, and they’re pretty sure they know what kind of truck they’re after – “most likely a rigid-bodied HGV with a tipper on the back or a roll-on, roll-off skip,” he says, with impressive specificity. He doesn’t yet know whodunnit, but he’s sure of one thing: “They really made a mistake dumping this in Lichfield.”