Waste Regulations 2011: What Carriers Must Do

Most guidance on the Waste Regulations 2011 is written for the person producing the waste. That is not much use if you are the one collecting it — the duties land on you differently, and on a domestic cesspit round they land on you almost entirely, because the householder is largely exempt.

This walks the parts of the regime that bind a liquid waste carrier: where the duty of care comes from, what the waste hierarchy declaration on your transfer note actually means, and what regulation 35 requires you to record and keep.

Two Instruments, Not One

The rules people mean when they say "the waste regulations" are split across two places.

The duty of care is older. It sits in section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and it has been there since before most operators reading this were in business.

The detail — what the paperwork must say, and the waste hierarchy obligation — sits in the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011. Regulation 1(4) is explicit about where they bite: "These Regulations extend to England and Wales."

If you cross into Scotland or Northern Ireland regularly, the equivalent duties there sit in different instruments and are administered by SEPA and DAERA respectively. Everything below is the England and Wales position.

The Duty of Care Names Carriers Specifically

Section 34(1) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 is one long sentence, and the list in it is the point:

"it shall be the duty of any person who imports, produces, carries, keeps, treats or disposes of controlled waste or, as a dealer or broker, has control of such waste, to take all such measures applicable to him in that capacity as are reasonable in the circumstances"

Carries. You are named in the statute, not caught by implication.

What those measures are is set out in the same subsection. Alongside preventing illegal deposit and preventing the waste escaping your control, subsection (1)(c) requires you, on transfer, to secure:

"(i) that the transfer is only to an authorised person or to a person for authorised transport purposes; and (ii) that there is transferred such a written description of the waste as will enable other persons to avoid a contravention of that section or regulation 12 of the Environmental Permitting Regulations, or a contravention of a condition of an environmental permit, and to comply with the duty under this subsection as respects the escape of waste."

Two obligations, and operators tend to focus on the second and forget the first. Who you tip to is as much your duty as the note you fill in. If the site you discharge at is not appropriately permitted for what is in your tanker, that is your problem as well as theirs.

Section 34(6) makes failure an offence, triable either way, with a fine on summary conviction and — on indictment — an unlimited one.

Why a Domestic Round Is Different

This is the bit almost no general waste guidance covers, and it changes how a cesspit round works compared with commercial waste collection.

Section 34(2) carves the householder out:

"The duty imposed by subsection (1) above does not apply to an occupier of domestic property as respects the household waste produced on the property."

So your customer, on a domestic septic tank job, does not carry the full duty of care. What they carry instead is a much narrower one under section 34(2A):

"It shall be the duty of the occupier of any domestic property in England or Wales to take all such measures available to him as are reasonable in the circumstances to secure that any transfer by him of household waste produced on the property is only to an authorised person or to a person for authorised transport purposes."

Their entire statutory duty, in practice, is to use a registered carrier. Everything else — the description, the code, the record, the disposal route — falls to you.

That has two practical consequences worth sitting with.

The first is that you cannot lean on the customer for classification. On a commercial job you can reasonably expect the producer to tell you what the waste is. On a domestic job there is nobody upstream of you who has any obligation to have thought about it.

The second is commercial rather than legal. Section 34(3)(d) lists "any person registered as a carrier of controlled waste under section 2 of the Control of Pollution (Amendment) Act 1989" among the authorised persons a householder may lawfully transfer to. A homeowner who checks the Environment Agency public register before booking is doing exactly what the Act asks of them — and increasingly they do. A current registration is not just compliance overhead; it is the thing that makes you bookable. Our waste carrier licence cost guide covers what keeping it current involves.

Regulation 12: The Waste Hierarchy, and Why It Is on Your Note

Regulation 12 is the one operators are most likely to have signed for without reading. It applies to:

"An establishment or undertaking which imports, produces, collects, transports, recovers or disposes of waste, or which as a dealer or broker has control of waste"

— which is you again — and it requires that undertaking, "on the transfer of waste, take all such measures available to it as are reasonable in the circumstances to apply the following waste hierarchy as a priority order— (a) prevention; (b) preparing for re-use; (c) recycling; (d) other recovery (for example energy recovery); (e) disposal."

Read literally that sounds like it belongs to a recycling business rather than a tanker. But regulation 12(2) allows departure from the order "so as to achieve the best overall environmental outcome where this is justified by life-cycle thinking", weighing technical feasibility and economic viability among other things — and for domestic septic sludge going to a permitted treatment works, that is the honest answer. The hierarchy is applied; the outcome is treatment and recovery at the works rather than anything you can do at the roadside.

The reason it matters on a practical level is that regulation 35(2)(d) requires every transfer note to "confirm that the transferor has discharged the duty in regulation 12". That declaration is a line or a tickbox on your note. It is not decoration — it is a statutory statement, and it is why the hierarchy is worth understanding rather than initialling.

Regulation 35: What the Note Must Say, and How Long You Keep It

Regulation 35 is the transfer note itself. It requires the written information to:

• "identify the waste to which it relates by reference to the appropriate codes in the List of Wastes", give a description, and state "its quantity and whether it is loose or in a container", the kind of container, "the time and place of transfer", and the transferor's SIC code
• "give the name and address of the transferor and the transferee and be signed by them"
• state which category each party falls into — producer, importer, transporter, local authority, permit holder, or "a person registered as a carrier of controlled waste under the Control of Pollution (Amendment) Act 1989, in which case the note must include the registration number (if any)"
• confirm the regulation 12 duty has been discharged

Regulation 35(4) and (5) allow all of that electronically, provided it can be produced "in a visible and legible documentary form" and the signature is an electronic signature. Digital notes are not a concession or a workaround — they have been expressly permitted since the Regulations were made.

Retention is regulation 35(6):

"The transferor and the transferee must keep the written information, or a copy of it, for at least 2 years and produce it to an officer of the appropriate body or of a waste collection authority on demand within 7 days."

Two years is the number most operators know. The seven days is the one they don't — and it is the harder half. An officer asking for a specific note from eighteen months ago gives you a week to find it. That is comfortable if your notes are searchable and uncomfortable if they are in carbon-copy pads in the back of a cab. Our guide to how long to keep waste transfer notes goes into the retention side; the full list of required fields covers what each note has to contain, and our free liquid waste transfer note generator produces notes carrying them.

Where Regulation 35 Stops Applying

One exception is worth knowing before you take an unfamiliar load. Regulation 35(7):

"This regulation does not apply where the waste transferred is hazardous waste and the consignment note and, where appropriate, schedule required by the Hazardous Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2005 or the Hazardous Waste (Wales) Regulations 2005 are completed and dealt with in accordance with those Regulations."

Hazardous loads leave this regime entirely and move under a consignment note instead. For a liquid waste operator the usual trigger is an interceptor or oil/water separator job — those codes are asterisked in the List of Wastes and are hazardous by definition. Our operator's guide to EWC codes for liquid waste sets out which codes cross that line.

What This Adds Up To on a Round

Four things, none of them onerous individually:

1. Check who you tip to. Section 34(1)(c)(i) makes the destination your duty, not just the paperwork.
2. Classify the load yourself on domestic work. The householder has no obligation to, and no realistic ability to.
3. Mean the hierarchy declaration. Regulation 35(2)(d) puts a statutory statement on every note you issue.
4. Be able to retrieve any note within a week for two years. That is a filing requirement dressed as a records requirement, and it is where paper rounds tend to fall down.

For the wider picture of running a compliant liquid waste operation — registration, equipment, pricing, and the coming digital tracking changes — see our cesspit emptying business guide.

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