Behind the football club on the outskirts of Calmore, Hampshire, on the eastern edge of the New Forest, there is a patch of waste ground – one day, it will be an Aldi supermarket – and beyond that, there is a small caravan site and a scrapyard. At the back of the yard more than 1,000 pallets had been piled up, two or three deep, in the open air. In places their wrapping bulged and split, and their contents – thousands upon thousands of bales of plastic medical aprons – had begun to spill out, blowing away into the neighbouring nature reserve.
When the BBC and national press caught up with the story last summer, the “PPE mountain” was said to have been dumped or fly-tipped, but that wasn’t true. As I discovered from a yard worker and a series of government contracts, it was being stored by a local plastics company commissioned to produce aprons for the NHS in 2020 in a deal worth more than £26m. Pictures of the site were enough to rouse an angry public, however, for whom it embodied the profligacy and opportunism exposed by the Covid pandemic.
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