Waste Management for the Food Industry & FMCG | AES

Food manufacturing and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sites produce some of the most varied and tightly regulated waste in British industry: food and organic waste, mountains of packaging, used cooking oil, animal by-products, and the cleaning chemicals and refrigerant that keep a plant running. This guide is for production managers, site engineers and procurement leads who want that waste handled compliantly and for less. It explains what the current rules require, where the money is usually hiding, and how we work as your appointed waste broker to survey your site, propose savings and manage the licensed contractors who carry the work out.

Absolute Environmental Solutions is a registered waste broker and dealer, not a waste carrier. We do not own vehicles or run facilities. We evaluate the supplier market on your behalf, appoint vetted licensed carriers and permitted facilities, and return the duty-of-care documentation that proves every load was handled lawfully.

The waste a food or FMCG operation actually produces

A food or drink plant rarely has one waste problem. It has a dozen, each with its own rules, its own destination and its own price:

• Food and organic waste. Off-specification product, trim, spoilage and preparation waste. Most of it falls under Chapter 02 of the List of Waste, which covers wastes from food preparation and processing.
• Packaging. Cardboard, plastic film, shrink-wrap, glass and metal, coded under the 15 01 packaging entries. This is usually the largest volume on site and the easiest to divert to recycling for a rebate rather than pay to dispose of.
• Animal by-products (ABP). Any site handling meat, fish, dairy or eggs generates ABP, split into categories 1, 2 and 3 by risk. These cannot go to general waste and must follow permitted routes such as rendering, incineration or, for lower-risk material, approved composting and anaerobic digestion.
• Used cooking oil. A valuable stream, not a disposal cost. Collected correctly, it is refined into biodiesel, so it should earn a rebate rather than incur a charge.
• Hazardous streams. Cleaning and sanitation chemicals, refrigerant gases, laboratory and QC waste, oils and effluent from plant maintenance. These carry hazardous properties and must move on a consignment note to a facility permitted to accept them.

The mistake we see most often is treating this range as a single contract with a single supplier, priced once and never revisited. That is almost always the expensive way to do it.

What the law now expects

Three areas of regulation shape how a food or FMCG business must manage waste, and all of them have moved recently.

Simpler Recycling. Since 31 March 2025, businesses in England with ten or more full-time-equivalent staff must separate their waste for collection: food waste, plus dry recyclables (plastic, paper and card, glass, and metals) kept apart from general waste. Smaller firms follow by 31 March 2027. For a food business this makes proper food-waste segregation a legal baseline rather than a nice-to-have.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging. Under the packaging EPR regulations, brand owners and larger businesses that place packaged goods on the UK market now pay fees based on the packaging they use, charged per tonne of material. For FMCG brands this turns every gram of unnecessary or hard-to-recycle packaging into a recurring cost, and it makes accurate packaging data and clean segregation matter more than ever.

Duty of care. Under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the duty of care sits with you, the waste producer, and using a broker does not remove it. You remain responsible for describing your waste accurately and for checking that whoever takes it is authorised. What we do is make that duty practical to discharge: we classify the waste, check the carrier and the destination, and hand you the evidence.

How we work with you

Our process has three stages, and it starts on your site, not in a call centre.

One: an on-site waste survey

We visit your premises and review your waste in full. What streams you produce, in what volumes, how they are currently stored and segregated, where they go now and what you pay. We look for the compliance gaps that create risk, such as ABP going into general waste, or hazardous chemicals sharing a container with something they should never touch. This survey is free and carries no obligation.

Two: proposals designed to save you money

We then produce a written cost-saving report. In a food or FMCG operation the savings usually come from the same places: right-sizing containers and collection frequency so you stop paying to move air, improving segregation so recyclables and food waste earn a rebate instead of a disposal charge, consolidating a scattered list of suppliers into one managed arrangement, and correcting classification so nothing is over-coded as hazardous. Over-classification is quietly expensive, adding a consignment note and a higher gate fee to every load for years, when segregating one component at source would remove the problem entirely.

Three: we take over supplier management

Once you approve the plan, we manage it. We source, vet and appoint the licensed carriers and permitted facilities for each stream, and we manage them on your behalf as a single point of contact. We route food waste to anaerobic digestion or composting rather than landfill wherever possible, send packaging to recycling, direct ABP down its correct permitted route by category, and consign hazardous waste to a properly permitted facility. You get one managed service instead of a filing cabinet of separate contracts.

Documentation on every movement

Every project returns a complete duty-of-care file. Non-hazardous movements are covered by a waste transfer note; hazardous movements by a consignment note. Each comes with the carrier's registration number, the receiving facility's permit reference, the EWC code applied to each stream and confirmation of final recovery or disposal. You are legally required to keep transfer notes for two years and consignment notes for three, so the file is issued in a form you can keep. If an auditor, a customer or a regulator ever asks you to trace a load, the answer is already on record.

Book a free on-site waste consultation

If your food or FMCG site is paying more than it should, or you are not confident it meets the current Simpler Recycling and duty-of-care rules, the best place to start is a survey of what you actually produce. Book a free, no-obligation on-site waste consultation, and we will review your streams, identify the savings and set out exactly how we would manage your waste compliantly on your behalf.