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A Guide to the new 2015 Waste Regulations

The way you are required to dispose of your commercial, industrial and household waste is all set to change in 2015 – here’s our guide to make sure you’re prepared for it.

What’s happening?

From January 1st, 2015, the UK waste regulations will require businesses and households to fully segregate their waste into general and recyclables. This includes dry mixed recyclables such as paper, plastic, metal and glass. The idea behind it is to ensure an improvement to the quantity and quality of recycling across the UK.

What does this mean for your business?

Whilst businesses are currently advised to recycle as much as possible, there is no strict legislation enforcing you to do so. However, from 2015 you must ensure that all your dry recyclable waste produce (paper, plastic, metal and glass) is segregated from your general waste before being put out for collection.

The recyclables mentioned in the legislation fall within waste collection that’s known as Dry Mixed Recycling (DMR). All other waste items such as food, electrical, confidential data or fluorescents can all be recycled as well, allowing you to go the extra mile, although the 2015 waste legislation update does not specifically mention them.

What should you do?

Since the legislation will be in place on January 1st, you need to start planning ahead and begin organising and managing your waste correctly, to make the transition as smooth as possible for your business. It’s not ideal to wait until then before acting upon it in a last minute hurry

The government encourages businesses and households to practice waste prevention and reduction as a first attempt at managing their waste. Once it comes to disposal, your business is required to take out a waste contract which allows the collection of your general waste to be segregated from the collection of your glass, metal, paper and plastic.

TEEP explained

TEEP stands for ‘Technically, environmentally and economically practicable‘and in this case it essentially means:

  • You’ll only need to follow these regulations if it is technically practical to do so, and having these separate collections is proven to work.
  • That there’s a positive environmental benefit to doing it, or it reduces a negative impact non separated collections might have.
  • That there’s no excessive costs in comparison with a non separated waste stream, taking into account the added value of recovery and recycling
  • If you’ve already got a DMR collection, you should be fine!