Illegal waste dumping scandal at Grimberg Port exposed

Grimberg Port's toxic legacy: How illegal dumping poisoned the Ruhr region for years

A Massive Illegal Dump at Gelsenkirchen's Grimberg Port Has Sparked Years of Conflict in the Ruhr Region

For years, a colossal illegal waste site at Grimberg Port in Gelsenkirchen has been a source of contention in the Ruhr area. Some of the garbage originates from municipal operations, as revealed by a CORRECTIV investigation in mid-February. A dispute has now erupted between the corporations RWE and Remondis over the disposal of ash from a waste incineration plant that has been piling up at the site.

Originally, the Becker Group, based in Bottrop, was responsible for processing all the waste. The company first made headlines in 2011 due to a different waste scandal. CORRECTIV's findings now show a connection between that case and today's towering waste mountains: the Grimberg Port location. Various Becker subsidiaries operated two waste processing facilities there.

Investigative files and penalty orders obtained by CORRECTIV confirm that the Grimberg Port sites also served as a transshipment hub and staging ground for illegally dumping waste elsewhere—on a landfill that another Becker-owned company was supposed to be remediating.

A query to the authorities responsible for the original investigation further reveals that a multimillion-euro fine imposed on Heinrich Becker GmbH in 2012 for its role in the scandal remains unpaid to this day.

The Bottrop-based Becker Group was a family-run business. Under the name "Becker Umweltschutz" (Becker Environmental Services), it was widely known throughout the Ruhr region. Not only municipalities but also major corporations like Ruhrkohle AG (later RAG Aktiengesellschaft) and Thyssenkrupp used its services.

Beyond waste disposal, Becker was active in demolition and remediation projects, including the Königsgalerie in Duisburg, the Sparkasse bank in Gladbeck, Lüdenscheid train station, and the old gasworks in Hamm—its portfolio could fill pages.

The Becker Group also gained recognition for its involvement in football. It bankrolled the rise of a local Oberhausen club to the top of the Oberliga (fifth division). There were also apparent ties to Schalke 04. In 2001, the Royal Blues played a friendly match against the Oberliga team. Gerhard Rehberg, who served as Schalke's CEO from 1994 to 2007, was said to have frequently visited Becker's headquarters in Bottrop.

All of that is now long in the past. Most of Becker's companies have gone bankrupt, and its former executives are well past retirement age. The Oberhausen football club has slipped into the Kreisliga (lowest amateur tier). The "Becker Umweltschutz" logo, still fading on the stadium scoreboard, is a relic of a vanished era. Were it not for the towering waste heaps in Gelsenkirchen, the company's legacy might have already disappeared entirely.

A Look Back: The Pluto Landfill Scandal From 2006 to 2010, Heinrich Becker GmbH was contracted to remediate the Pluto landfill, a Thyssenkrupp legacy site in Herne located just a few kilometers south of Grimberg Port. Today, the site is accessible to the public as a so-called "landscape structure."

What is increasingly being forgotten, however, is that beneath the now grass-covered hills lie toxic waste remnants from last century's steel production: blast furnace sludge—a dust-water mixture generated during the cleaning of Thyssenkrupp's blast furnaces, heavily contaminated with highly toxic cyanides. The groundwater in the area remains polluted to this day.

Thyssenkrupp had hired Heinrich Becker GmbH to cap the sludge landfill, preventing rainwater from seeping in and leaching out poisons. Incinerator ash was among the approved materials for the cover—allowing Becker to legally dispose of hundreds of thousands of tons of it.

Illegal Waste Buried Beneath the Ash Beneath that ash, however, Becker had also dumped unauthorized waste at the landfill: old plastic garden furniture, discarded tires, batteries, gypsum waste, foundry slag, and allegedly contaminated gas station soil. These findings are detailed in an expert report commissioned by the city of Herne at the time, which CORRECTIV has reviewed. The report notes that excavations—triggered by anonymous tips—revealed "strong odors of benzene and tar oil from a depth of 2 meters.""It was absolute chaos down there," one expert involved in the landfill investigation told CORRECTIV.

Despite the "chaos," the illegal waste remained on the landfill. Instead, the city of Herne pushed for the completion of the site's remediation. This is evident from a 2011 email to North Rhine-Westphalia's Ministry of the Environment, a document also obtained by CORRECTIV. In it, the city's environmental authority warned of the "high risk potential" posed by the sludge landfill to groundwater, noting that contamination had already occurred.

The hazard from the toxic legacy site was apparently greater than the damage caused by the illegal dumping. Yet the illicit operation still had consequences: In 2012, the Herne-Wanne district court convicted five employees of the Becker company to prison terms ranging from three months to one year, all suspended.

Backgrounds Shrouded in Darkness—Until Now

No public trial was held at the time, leaving the full scope of the illegal dumping and its background obscured. Until now.

The penalty orders from that period, now in CORRECTIV's possession, reveal that the two company bosses were among those convicted. They were accused of ordering the illegal disposal of roughly 270,000 tons of waste at the sludge landfill.

Court records further state that "a large portion of the material" passed through the Grimberg port facility. As a result, both the plant manager and his deputy were also convicted.

The fifth Becker employee was prosecuted for allegedly forging weighbridge receipts—using "a computer connected to the scales in Grimberg." The convicted individuals were ordered to pay between €30,000 and €200,000 to the state treasury as part of their probation conditions.

€2.5 Million Fine—Only "Partially" Paid

The responsible company, Becker, also faced steep costs. In a ruling dated July 12, 2012, the court imposed a fine of €2.5 million, primarily to confiscate the economic benefits the firm had gained from the illegal dumping.

However, according to the Bochum public prosecutor's office in response to a CORRECTIV inquiry, Becker has only paid the fine "in part" to this day. The prosecution declined to disclose further details, such as the exact amount paid so far.

Becker itself also declined to comment when contacted by CORRECTIV—neither on the fine nor on the offenses committed during the remediation of the Pluto sludge landfill.

Business as Usual

Despite the criminal wrongdoing, the Bottrop-based corporate group continued its operations. Another Becker subsidiary reportedly completed the remediation of the Pluto landfill, according to Thyssenkrupp. The RAG AG (formerly Ruhrkohle AG), which owns the Grimberg port site in Gelsenkirchen, maintained its lease agreement with Becker. Until the end of 2014, ash from the Essen-Karnap waste incineration plant was still being deposited there.

Even in 2017, municipal waste companies were still delivering rubble and construction debris to the site. A local resident reported that the waste piles were visible from afar. Yet apparently, no one was willing—or able—to do without Becker's services.