If you get waste management wrong—even if you just failed to take proper care—you can end up in court. But if you get it right, you can open the door to the circular economy. In the UK, the system for waste tracking is going digital. This increases the risk of prosecution, but also will allow companies to sell or source reusable materials.
Craig Burman is a solicitor with Schofield Sweeney, specialising in environmental law. Prior to that, he was a prosecutor with the Environment Agency. “There’s been a trend over the last 10 years in environmental prosecutions, not only the company is prosecuted, but often the directors or those officers of the company that have been involved in the offending are also prosecuted,” he says. “An individual within an organisation could find themself in court personally, for either neglecting or consenting to something that ultimately ends up being an offence, and that catches a lot of people out.”
Sharon Palmer is head of environmental services at The Clancy Group, a UK contractor specialising in the utilities sector. “The risks these days, in terms of fines, and reputational damage are just absolutely huge,” she says. “Nobody can really afford even the smallest slip. It can be quite costly in both financial terms, but also in business opportunities as well.”
The waste industry is far more complex than most supply chains. We’re used to thinking of supply chains as one-way. Businesses take their place in the chain, bringing in raw materials or components, working on them, and passing them on to the next business in the chain. But in waste, companies can be both sources and receivers of waste. They may be responsible for transporting, storing, and disposing of it, for themselves or for others. And they can also be users of waste, as they transform it into something new.
That’s what Tarmac are doing with a new range of aggregates made from materials reclaimed from waste, known as CSAggs, or circular solution aggregates. Within this range, is a product under development called CS Trench, a non flammable stabilised material for reinstatement, known as an NFSMR. It’s a product that could be ideal for companies like Clancy, allowing them to refill trenches with the material they have dug up
“I’m currently working on CS trench, which is an alternative reinstatement material, a non flammable stabilised material for reinstatement or NFSMR,” explains Hannah Haeffner, national recovery and recycling manager for Tarmac. “We’re partnering with a company called SMR to bring this to market. Instead of taking out your utility trench, and then disposing of that material in a landfill, we will use a binding product from SMR to mix with that and be able to put that back in the trench. So you’re going to utilise the whole of that material.”
Where there’s well classified waste, there’s brass
Waste can be both a threat, and an opportunity. To avoid the risks, and reap the rewards, everyone in the industry must be able to track where and who waste comes from, what it consists of, and how it should be handled.
There’s an old adage, attributed to the famously plain-spoken businessmen of Yorkshire, that, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. The meaning is that one shouldn’t let the perceived dirtiness of a business be a barrier to making money. While that is often true, in waste the use of the term ‘muck’ has been a long standing barrier to profit.
Often, when waste is generated through demolition or excavation, it will be described merely as ‘muck’ or ‘muckaway’. But this is unclear. Were you digging up soil from around a leaking sewage main? Was the site you were working on once home to a lead paint factory, or a tanners’ yard? Was the building you are taking down built using asbestos? If that is the case, then you—and everyone you transfer that waste to—will have to take specific steps to comply with your duty of care. If you don’t, you might find yourself up in front of a judge. But, at the same time, if you show it is truly inert soil, you may well be able to reuse it yourself—cutting material and, perhaps, transport costs—or sell it to someone else. You can only know if you carry out the proper on-site tests and desk-based research; and you can only comply with the law if you classify it using the correct waste classification
“There’s a duty of care on every operator that deals in some way with waste, be that producing, transporting, disposing or keeping,” says Burman. “There’s two pieces of legislation that govern that, primarily. And that’s the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016 and the Environmental Protection Act of 1990. And in the Environmental Protection Act of 1990, there are specific duty of care obligations that require those people dealing in waste, to take reasonable steps, for example, to make sure it gets to where it should be going, and only is dealt with by people who are authorised to do so. And to keep a record of the waste, that’s an accurate description of the waste, and to take steps to prevent it escaping.
“So that’s primarily in terms of duty of care where those obligations come from, tied in with the environmental permitting regulations, which set out who can deal with waste, how that waste has to be dealt with, the fact that you need an environmental permit for most of the waste processing activities, and then into the nitty gritty of what goes into a permit and how you comply with your permit. So those two pieces of legislation read together, provide a framework.”
As Palmer explains, the first step in complying with these regulations is to make sure that you’re classifying waste correctly. “That involves a really big technical document, known as WM3. It gives each waste type a waste classification code, so each type of waste, you will be able to put into a little box and say, [as is the case for most of the waste Clancy generates] ‘Okay, that is mostly soils and stones. So that would be given a Waste Classification Code of 17 05 04’.”
While companies like Tarmac and Clancy might take care to ensure that everyone in the business understands their responsibilities under the law, not every waste handler does. The system in the UK is currently entirely paper-based. A waste transfer note is created where the waste is generated. As it passes from the original waste source, to a haulier, on to a temporary storage and sorting facility, and then on to its final disposal or reuse, a copy of the note is taken at each step.
That means that, if the first person in the chain writes ‘muck’, where they might mean ‘inert soil, classification 17 05 04’, no-one in the chain is abe to comply with their legal obligations.
“At every stop from the producer, each facility or receiver has to check that what they’re receiving matches what it says on the paperwork,” says Jessica Morgan-Smith, a consultant from environmental specialists MPG. Now, that’s been open to illegal operations, because down the chain, each person is happy to accept something that isn’t accurately described in the paperwork.”
It also creates a lot of paper.
“It feels really old fashioned, but the majority of the country is still using a paper trail. We fill out a waste transfer note—we have books of them, and they’ve got various requirements on there, they need the waste classification code, they need the amount, where it’s going, where it’s been produced—and that is physically passed from person to person.
“If you’ve got a waste site, you’ve got to keep it till you give your permit back. So, you know, if you’ve got an inert landfill site for 20 years. Some of these sites are taking a million tonnes a year. Can you imagine how many waste transfer notes that is? Storage containers, full of them!”
Clancy has been working recently to move away from this purely-paper based system. That will allow the company to see the real value—and cost—of the waste it produces. But a system like this can only go so far, allowing the company to trace overall amounts of waste it produces. It can’t—without industry wide adoption—provide the detail that would really help turn waste into brass.
Digital transformation
The proliferation of paper-based notes also makes the sector nigh on impossible to regulate, says Burman, “Without any criticism at all of the Environment Agency, it is quite significantly underfunded for the role that it has to play. The whole system really is based on operator compliance. So the system that we operate, that’s governed by the Environment Agency, presupposes that the majority of operators will be compliant. It’s light touch regulation, it’s self regulation.”
The system is further complicated by the use of ‘exemptions’. These allow, for example, a heavy goods vehicle maintenance company to dismantle a couple of vehicles at a time, storing the parts, without applying for a waste handling permit. Other businesses might want to temporarily expand their operations; again, they might be able to cover part of this using an exemption.
“The trouble is that what it would require [to regulate this well] is the Environment Agency visiting every exempt site in the country and assessing whether or not they are compliant with their exemption,” says Morgan-Smith. “Recently, I applied for a Freedom of Information request to the environmental agency asking for the approximate number of exemptions registered in England. And as of the fourth of April 2023, there were 127,932 exemptions registered in England. I think the exemption regime was largely based on trust that people would comply with the exemptions, because it would be impossible to regulate 127,000 sites. The Environment Agency is so stretched already. That simply isn’t a task that could ever be completed.”
Instead, the UK government is planning to remove many of these exemptions. And, it is planning to launch a new digital system for tracking waste. “The government is proposing a digital waste tracking system,” says Palmer. “It’ll bring some challenges initially, I think, but will certainly produce a more streamlined approach. We as a waste producer will be able to see exactly where our waste has gone. We’ll be able to look at that system, as much as the regulator will, or the carrier will, or whoever is involved in that process will. It’ll give us much clearer information and waste data. It is really the biggest change, since duty of care was introduced.”
So far, the details of the scheme are unknown. But one thing is pretty much certain: it will use some sort of dropdown or question tree that will force everyone in the chain to select the correct WM3 classification code. When that happens, there’ll be no space to just call waste ‘muck’. To use the system, everyone in any business will need to have had appropriate training.
The time is now
“It’s going to impact on every waste producer in the country,” says Palmer. “And I am a little concerned that we haven’t got a great deal of time. We haven’t yet had the government response to the 2022 public consultation. We don’t quite know when implementation is going to happen. I think it’s probably going to be within the next two years.
“Companies really need to be starting to prepare now. They need to get their house in order, make sure they’ve got the right procedures and systems in place. If the regulator wants to have a look at your waste transfer notes now, they pretty much have to come and ask you for the paper copies. But, under digital waste tracking, they’ll be able to look at almost anything at the touch of a button, from behind their desk.”
Haeffner has been busy getting Tarmac ready for the change. Tarmac’s approach has been to develop a modular training programme. “We will start rolling that out for everybody. It won’t just be your site managers that handle waste, everybody in Tarmac will need an element [of the training]. There will be the module for everybody, just a basic understanding for directors downwards, of what waste is and what the issues are, and what the pitfalls can be, if we don’t get it right.
“And then you’ll go into module two, which will be very much about sites producing waste and what you’d need to do there to make sure that as a waste producer, we are compliant on site, and we have to follow these certain processes and procedures to make sure that we are we’re correct in that.” Further modules will relate to specific aspects of the Tarmac business.
In some ways, the digital waste tracking system can be expected to help with training, and even with how companies understand their duty of care. You’ll need to know what waste you are dealing with, in order to complete the transfer.
The industry will have to deal with some uncertainty as it waits for the government to respond to the public consultation. But companies like Tarmac and Clancy are working to get ahead of whatever comes.
The end of many exemptions, and the introduction of digital waste tracking, is going to be a major headache for many in the industry over the next few years. But when it is in full operation in the UK, companies will have more certainty that the waste they generate, transfer or receive has been properly recorded.
They’ll be able to check and analyse all of their waste activities and waste streams, from behind their desk. As will the regulator, and its prosecutors.
But it will help companies produce accurate calculations of their carbon costs, and to identify new business opportunities.
Preparing for digital waste tracking will take planning, and investment.
But that investment won’t be going to waste.
