A leading food importer's salad days are over after a court ruled that 91 litres of spilled salad dressing could not be construed as a 'real and immediate threat' to workers and should not have been flushed into the Shing Mun River. A warehouse worker for Sims Trading, a division of Citic Pacific Ltd, slipped up when he decided to flush salad dressing - spilled when a carton of bottles broke during loading - into the river in Sha Tin. The company was prosecuted for the incident in June 2001 and fined $15,000 under the Water Pollution Control Ordinance. Sims Trading lodged an appeal on the grounds that the spilled salad cream constituted an 'occurrence in which life or property was endangered'. But a Court of First Instance judge rejected the argument, saying that, had it been successful, one could flush banana peel down the drain because people could slip on it. The appeal was dismissed in June last year. The case came to light after the Environment Protection Department (EPD) released year-end figures on convictions and complaints it received last year. According to the department, the judge, whose name it did not release, said: 'An occurrence in which life or property was endangered should mean some immediate or real danger and something had to be done as a matter of emergency to avoid that danger. The possibility of an accident [due to slipping] in salad dressing would not fall within that requirement,' he said. A spokeswoman for Sims Trading yesterday said the company had revised its internal procedures to prevent a repeat of what it said was an isolated incident. 'We respect the court judgment and we support environmental protection,' she said. The EPD's year-end figures showed a decrease in the number of convictions from 1,041 in 2001 to 771 last year. The department handled 25,570 complaints last year, about the same as the previous year.
