Digital waste tracking
The government in the UK is planning to implement a central mandatory service for digital waste tracking. Mandatory digital waste tracking will come into force from April 2025 – with the digital waste tracking service being publicly available to users on a voluntary basis in 2024.
Back in 2022 the UK government, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland, published a consultation on their proposals for the service. This feedback has been used in developing secondary legislation and also to shape the digital design of the waste tracking service.
It must also be stressed that this is a UK wide initiative, The environmental regulators in all 4 nations are also partners in this project and actively involved in the development of the service.
They assert that the service will have a positive effect on the “coverage, quality and timeliness of the data that is collected and facilitate more efficient and effective waste regulation and intervention by joining up and digitising currently fragmented, and mostly paper based, systems to provide a single comprehensive way of tracking the amount and type of waste being produced and where it ends up.”
Digital waste tracking is included in key government commitments such as the Resources and Waste Strategy in England, and will contribute towards the aims of other key strategies such as the:
- 25 Year Environment Plan
- UK’s Industrial Strategy – moving towards a regenerative, circular economy
- Clean Growth Strategy –UK is to be a zero avoidable waste economy by 2050 , emphasising the need to extract value from our resources
- Welsh Government’s Beyond Recycling Strategy – commits to introducing a mandatory waste tracking system to track where wastes end up and to provide annual information on industrial, commercial and demolition waste produced in Wales.
- Welsh Government’s Net Zero Wales Carbon Budget 2 (2021 to 2025) – policy 52 commits to increased resource efficiency in industry and business.
- Making Things Last: a circular economy strategy for Scotland – supports Scotland’s vision for a circular economy and recognises the value of waste as a resource
- One Planet Prosperity: Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) regulatory strategy – information and evidence provided by waste tracking will aid SEPA’s ability to track compliance, prioritise regulatory activities and help prevent waste crime
- Draft Green Growth Strategy for Northern Ireland –multi-decade strategy, balancing climate, environment and the economy.
- Draft Environment Strategy – will set Northern Ireland’s environmental priorities for the coming decades, including reducing waste, movement towards a circular economy and improving processes for managing pollution
At Waste Efficiency, we have been providing a full digital tracking service for a number of years now. We see this a really positive step forward and a move that will support effective regulation of waste, aid Duty of Care compliance for businesses whilst moving towards a more circular economy by mximising the value from resources, and crucially, clamp down on waste criminals to operate by mis-handling of waste, illegal exports, and flytipping
On the government website, it states:
Through the Environment Act 2021, we already have primary legislation in place which provides the powers to introduce mandatory digital waste tracking regulations (clauses 34CA and 34CB of the Environment Protection Act 1990). These regulations can place requirements on relevant waste controllers, or a waste authority, to enter certain information related to the tracking of waste into the waste tracking service.
We will also be making a range of legislative amendments across the United Kingdom, including (but not exhaustively limited to) legislation relating to the waste duty of care, hazardous waste, transfrontier shipments of waste, waste permitting and licensing and in Wales the statutory use of WasteDataFlow by local authorities. The waste duty of care codes of practice will also need to be revised.
At Waste Efficiency, we are already tracking all our customer’s waste electronically, in great depth and detail – right down to capturing the carbon associated with every waste movement from site to end disposal point.
If you want to find out more on how to future proof your business and get ahead of the curve now, contact us for a demo and a free on site waste audit.