Being an Environment Officer is one of the most important roles at the Environment Agency. Environment Officers regulate waste sites and other activities across a range of urban and rural sites, all of which may impact on the local environment. This involves our customer facing frontline teams working directly to help create a cleaner, safer and healthier environment.
Based in our Chippenham offices, you’ll work in a team focusing on operators and companies in the waste sector. The work includes:
- Enforcing environmental regulations.
- Influencing companies and businesses to move from correction to prevention.
- Using your excellent customer service skills to engage with local communities and operators.
- Visiting sites to conduct inspections.
- Dealing with and investigating environmental offences and incidents.
- Giving evidence in court.
- Attending to out of hours emergencies as part of a standby rota.
- Advising how people and businesses can improve the environment.
You will be responsible for regulating a range of activities to ensure they are carried out without polluting the environment or causing harm to people. Sometimes we have to take tough action to achieve these aims and, at times, you will need to investigate environmental offences. You may also be required on occasion to give evidence in a court of law.
The role will require you to take preventative actions as well as supporting wider incident management. This will include taking part in a duty rota to provide a 24 hour response to incidents. This is a team role and you’ll never be on your own – you’ll have back up from colleagues and incident support staff.
The job is extremely varied, vital and sometimes challenging. You may be working with business customers to help them operate legally; while at other times you will be enforcing the law and making sure operators improve their performance.