Waste duty of care does not end when the vehicle leaves your gate. Here is what section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 actually requires of a producer, and what your file needs to contain if it is ever asked for.
Under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, anyone who produces, imports, keeps, treats or disposes of controlled waste has a duty to take all reasonable steps to ensure it is handled properly. In practice that means three things: your waste must only be passed to someone authorised to take it, it must be described accurately enough for them to handle it lawfully, and the transfer must be documented. The duty is not discharged when the load leaves your gate.
Who you may pass waste to
Waste may only be transferred to an authorised person: a registered waste carrier, a holder of an environmental permit, or someone operating under a registered exemption. Checking that authorisation is your responsibility, not theirs, and it is checkable in about a minute — the Environment Agency publishes both the carrier, broker and dealer register and the permit register online.
Two details catch people out. A registration can lapse or be revoked between jobs, so a check made two years ago is not evidence today. And a carrier registration authorises someone to move waste, not to accept it — the destination needs its own permit or exemption for the specific waste type arriving.
What the description has to say
The written description must be good enough for everyone who handles the waste afterwards to do so lawfully and safely. In practice that means the six-digit code from the List of Waste, the quantity, the type of container, and anything about the material that affects how it must be treated. “General waste” is not a description; nor is a product name that says nothing about what is now in the drum.
What your file should contain
- A waste transfer note for every non-hazardous transfer, kept for two years.
- A consignment note for every hazardous movement, kept for three years, along with the consignee return that confirms what the receiving site actually did with it.
- Evidence of the checks you made on the carrier and on the destination, dated.
- Where relevant, the analysis or sampling that supports the classification you gave the waste.
Season tickets — annual transfer notes covering regular collections of the same waste from the same place — are permitted for non-hazardous waste and save a great deal of paper, provided nothing about the waste or the arrangement changes during the year.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most common failure is not fly-tipping by a rogue operator; it is a complete set of notes describing the waste wrongly. A description that understates a hazardous property leaves the producer exposed even when every other step was done properly, because the duty is to describe the waste accurately, and the producer is the only party who knows what went into the container.
The second most common is a gap in the chain: a transfer note but no consignee return, so nothing on file records what happened at the end. If you can trace every load you produced last year to a named permitted site and a confirmed recovery or disposal operation, your duty of care file is doing its job.