Construction waste was illegally dumped while a police station in the Troodos mountain village of Evrychou was being built, according to a report released by the audit office on Tuesday.

The report stated that the company contracted to construct the police station had an “initial obligation” to transport most of the waste to a “licenced site”, while also being allowed to “manage at source part of the volume”, and use it “mainly as landfill material”.

However, it said, according to information and documents it had received from the public works department, “it clearly emerges that the contractor revised, during the execution stage of the project, the way of managing” the construction waste.

“The contractor had the right to reuse the construction waste for backfilling only within the construction site, and not to place it in adjacent areas,” it said.

Despite this, however, some of the waste was dumped in an adjacent plot which belongs to the local school board.

It stressed that the environment department’s guidelines state that the waste produced “can be used for backfilling … in areas where excavations have been carried out or for engineering reasons in landscape architecture under specific conditions”, but that these conditions were not fulfilled during the construction of the police station.

The environment department’s investigation into the matter, it said, found that “from the total balance of quantities of rubble which resulted from the earthmoving work, 6,547 cubic metres remained as the remainder of what had been excavated”.

It added that of that quantity, 6,384 cubic metres of waste were dumped in adjacent areas.

It said the environment department had found that due to the laying of asphalt at the police station and “the existence of waste there from the past”, there was “difficulty in removing the waste placed before and during the construction” of the police station.

As such, it quoted the department as saying, “it is not possible to remove the waste and restore the site”.

 It added that the environment department had found that the materials dumped were “suitable” to be left where they were, and that the “necessary laboratory tests” had been carried out to prove this, and that for this reason, the department “considers that the removal of construction waste and the restoration of the area is not required”.

The audit office then lamented a “significant delay” in the environment department’s decision to investigate the matter, saying that allegations had been “initially raised” as early as January 2022, but that it was not informed by the environment department about the result of any investigation until October 27 this year.

It also said that during the construction of the police station, the government’s waste management plan was not followed, and that the amount of waste to be produced was only confirmed after the fact.