Illegal cigarettes seized by Trading Standards are being turned into gardening products and alcohol used in electricity production, it’s been revealed.
Alongside Lincolnshire Police, it’s cracked down on businesses selling illegal products in the last two years.
A report to Lincolnshire County Council’s Public Protection and Security Scrutiny committee last week stated that in the 23/24 financial year it obtained 32 temporary closure orders and seized 394,993 illicit cigarettes, 54,350g of tobacco and 59.6 litres of illegal alcohol.
It also seized 11,637 illegal disposable vapes, an increase of 18.75 per cent from the 9,455 removed from sale during the 22/23 period.
Mark Keal, of Trading Standards, told the meeting that Trading Standards looks to recycle as much as possible.
“We do as best we can,” he said. “There are companies that specialise in taking product to turn them into usable products, for example there’s a company that takes illegal cigarettes and they turn them into a mulch for gardening.
“We tend to use them.
“With alcohol we take it to an electricity plant and it gets burnt there to contribute to the production of energy.
“We have people that take counterfeit clothing. If they can remove the brand they do that and if they can’t, they have specialist equipment to put their own logos over the top.
“They then sell those to shops with the money raised going to charity.
“We try not to send it to landfill if at all possible.”
Mr Keal was answering to a question from county councillor Paul Skinner, who also asked whether the council can seek to get back some of the money the traders had received for selling illegal goods.
“We can if we identify where there’s assets, which we can’t always do,” Mr Keal continued. “We’ve a financial investigator based at Derby City Council who does a fantastic job of checking financial information to see if there are any accounts they can trace back.
“If we can identify an asset we can look at what benefit they’ve had and we can look to make a confiscation claim against that.
“It’s not always there available though.
“We do find money moves in and out remarkably quickly and disappears.”
