A DOG toy company has paid out nearly £5,000 to support environmental projects after admitting failing to recycle sufficient packaging waste at its premises near Salisbury.

Kong Company Ltd supplies dog toys from its factory on the High Post Business Park. It made the Enforcement Undertaking (EU) offer after the Environment Agency found it had broken packaging waste regulations.

The £4,930 donation will be used by Salisbury-based charity, The Species Recovery Trust, to help fund three projects including the Salisbury Drinking Fountain Campaign that aims to reduce the number of single use water bottles purchased in the city centre and ultimately reduce plastic waste.

The money will also be used to help two endangered plants – the heath lobelia and the marsh clubmoss.

The Species Recovery Trust will work with partner organisations including Natural England, Hampshire Rare Plant Group, Millennium Seed Bank and Devon Wildlife Trust to improve the habitats and increase the populations of both these plant species.

Tessa Bowering for the Environment Agency said: "Enforcement Undertakings are a type of civil sanction that allow us to secure regulatory compliance from organisations. They also ensure businesses don’t profit from non-compliance and provide an opportunity for them to react responsibly to any offending.

"The Species Recovery Trust is an appropriate recipient of this payment because the project they are funding looks to reduce the amount of plastic packaging waste through the reduction of single use plastic bottles."

The Environment Agency says Kong Company Ltd saved £3,792 by failing to register with a packaging recovery scheme for the years 2012-2015 inclusive.

Its finance director admitted three offences under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations of 2007 including failing to register and take reasonable steps to recover and recycle waste packaging and failing to submit certificates of compliance to the appropriate agency.

A spokesman for the company said: "We are now fully compliant and wouldn’t have contravened the regulations had we been aware of our obligations at the time."