The waste management firm Biffa has been fined £350,000 for trying to ship household rubbish to China labelled as wastepaper fit for recycling.

Items found in the bales included sanitary towels, nappies, wet wipes and condoms – with the shipping containers reeking of vomit.

A search of seven 25-tonne shipping containers bound for China at Felixstowe port in Suffolk found waste items including plastic containers, plastic bags, scrap metal and electrical debris.

Other items found during the search included laminate flooring, coat hangers, pet food containers, latex gloves and pieces of china.

Environment Agency inspectors also found women’s underwear, bags of dog excrement and a 12-inch record by the 90s band Deee-Lite.

Biffa Waste Services, the second largest recycling company in the UK, claimed the bales contained 98.5% waste paper, which can be legally transported to China.

Shipping heavily contaminated waste to the country has been illegal since 2006 because it is not part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Biffa was convicted of two counts of breaching waste transportation laws between May and June 2015 after a three-week trial at Wood Green crown court in north London in June.

Jurors heard Biffa, which reported revenues of £683.6m last year, used two brokers to manage the deal to send the waste to sites in Shenzhen and Guangdong on the South China Sea coast.

One of the brokers arranged a shipment of 5,863 tonnes of wastepaper between Biffa worth £350,000, while the second arranged the sale of 4,992 tonnes of wastepaper worth £290,000.

However, the Environment Agency prevented any of the seven containers from leaving Felixstowe.

The company claimed its exports were regularly inspected by the Chinese authorities who had never made complaints, and that its clients were capable of generating significant quantities of paper from the bales it supplied.

Handing Biffa a £350,000 fine on Friday, the judge, Simon Auerbach, said: “The principle of this environmental regulation is to the prevent export of our waste processing and disposing of the problem to other parts of the world.

“Exporting to non-OECD countries is the very essence of the offence and the willingness of the Chinese authorities to accept it and their ability to process it are not, in my judgment, the point.”

Biffa was also ordered to pay £240,000 costs to the Environment Agency and a confiscation order of £9,912, which was the total amount it received for the blocked shipment of waste.

Richard Banwell, defending Biffa, highlighted the shortcomings of the UK’s waste management system as a whole, pointing out that of all the 8m tonnes of fibre recovered each year, just 3.3m tonnes can be recycled domestically.

He said Biffa’s business model of exporting waste was vital to helping the government meet its recovery and recycling targets.

Sailesh Mehta, prosecuting, said contaminants could be seen poking out of bales that were not broken open by inspectors.

Mehta said Biffa had dismissed suggestions that its waste sorting process could be improved to prevent contaminants ending up in bales of waste paper. The company had claimed its processes were already “as good as it gets” when ideas such as employing more pickers or slowing conveyor belts were floated.

“If all [these ideas] are impossible, we suggest it is incumbent on the defendant charged with this important duty to start the whole system afresh,” he said.

• This article was amended on 28 September 2019 to correct the spelling of Richard Banwell’s surname.