Waste transfer notes, and
the duty that follows the skip.

Waste is the one thing that leaves your site and takes a legal obligation with it. Hand a skip to somebody who is not registered to carry it, and the offence is yours as well as theirs. The paperwork that proves you did it properly is a single sheet, and most firms cannot find last year's.

What duty of care actually means

Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 places a duty of care on anyone who produces, carries, keeps, treats or disposes of controlled waste. On a construction site that is you, from the moment the material becomes waste until it reaches somebody legally entitled to take it.

The duty has three practical limbs. Store it so it cannot escape. Transfer it only to an authorised person. And describe it accurately enough that everyone down the chain can handle it lawfully. The waste transfer note is the evidence for the second and third.

The part that surprises people is that the duty does not end at the gate. If your waste is fly-tipped three counties away, the question asked is whether you took reasonable steps to check who you gave it to. A note in the file with a registration number you never verified is a weaker answer than most firms assume.

What has to be on the note

A waste transfer note is not a long document, and the required content is settled:

• A description of the waste, specific enough to be useful. Mixed construction and demolition waste is a description. Rubbish is not.
• The relevant waste classification code, the six-digit entry from the List of Waste that matches what is actually in the skip.
• How much there is, by weight, volume or number of containers.
• The type of container it left in.
• Where and when the transfer took place.
• Both parties' names and addresses, yours and the carrier's.
• The carrier's registration number and the authority that issued it.
• Signatures from both sides.

Where the same waste goes to the same place in the same way on a regular basis, a season ticket covers repeated transfers for up to a year rather than generating a note per load. That is a real saving on a long job with a weekly skip exchange, and it is underused.

The registration number is the only field on the note that can be checked in thirty seconds and the only one that ever gets checked by an inspector.

Checking the carrier, before the lorry moves

Anyone transporting your waste as a business must be registered with the Environment Agency, or with Natural Resources Wales, SEPA or the NIEA depending on where you are working. Registration is public and searchable, and the check takes less time than signing the note does.

Two things make this worth doing rather than assuming. Registrations expire, so a carrier you have used for three years may not be registered today. And an upper tier registration is different from a lower tier one, which matters if what you are moving is hazardous.

Record the fact that you checked, with the date. That record, not the number itself, is what turns a defence of reasonable steps from an assertion into evidence.

Where hazardous waste is different

Asbestos, contaminated soil, most solvent-based products, fluorescent tubes, batteries, oils and a good deal of what comes out of a strip-out are hazardous waste, and they do not travel on an ordinary transfer note. They travel on a consignment note, which carries a unique code, and the consignor has additional obligations including notification in some cases.

The retention period is different too, and this is the detail firms most often get wrong:

• Ordinary waste transfer notes: two years.
• Hazardous waste consignment notes: three years.

Filing everything for two years is therefore not compliance. It is compliance for the easy half and a gap on the half that carries the larger penalty.

How it fails in practice

Nobody sets out to breach duty of care. The failure is nearly always administrative, and it is nearly always one of these:

1. The note lives in the cab. It is signed on a clipboard, handed to a driver, and the site copy goes into a folder in a cabin that is demobilised at the end of the job.
2. The description is generic. Waste, or builders waste, on every note for eighteen months. It tells an inspector that nobody looked in the skip.
3. The classification code is copied forward. Whatever code was used first is reused, including on the load that contained something it should not have.
4. Nobody checked the carrier. The number is written down because it is a field on the form, and no one has ever resolved it against the register.
5. The two-year clock is unowned. Notes are kept until somebody tidies up, which is not the same as being kept for two years, and is discovered to be different only when they are asked for.

What controlling it takes

Very little, if the record is made where the job is rather than where the skip is. Three things:

The note itself, attached to the project it came from, at the moment it is signed rather than at the end of the month. A photograph of a signed docket taken on a phone at the gate is a perfectly good record if it lands somewhere it can be found by project and date.

The carrier's registration held once, against the carrier, with its expiry date, so the check is a standing fact about a supplier rather than a task repeated per load and skipped under pressure.

And a retention clock that knows the difference between two years and three, running from the transfer date, on a register somebody actually opens.

Where to start, on Monday

Ask for the transfer notes from one job that finished eighteen months ago. Not all of them, just that one job. How long it takes to produce them, and whether they are complete, tells you everything about whether the system you have would survive being asked by somebody with a statutory power to ask.

Then do the single cheapest thing in this article: resolve the registration numbers of the three carriers you use most against the public register, and write down the date you did it. If one of them has lapsed, you have just found the reason this matters.