This guide is for businesses and waste treatment operators that send waste to a landfill site.
You must also follow the rules for how to dispose of business waste.
Before you dispose of waste to landfill you must:
- classify your waste as hazardous or non-hazardous
- treat the waste
- make sure the landfill site can accept your waste
You must complete the following:
- waste information (formerly a transfer note) or hazardous waste consignment note
- waste description, including the basic characterisation of the waste
Businesses that produce waste
A waste treatment operator or haulage contractor will usually take your waste to the landfill site. As the original producer of the waste, you need to provide information to them so that they can decide what treatment is needed. If you treat your own waste and send the waste to landfill you must follow the rules in this guide.
Banned waste
There is some waste you cannot send to landfill. This includes:
- any liquid waste, including waste water but excluding sludge
- waste that would be explosive, corrosive, oxidising, flammable or highly flammable
- infectious medical or veterinary waste
- chemical substances from research and development whose effects are not known
- whole or shredded used tyres, except for bicycle tyres and tyres with a diameter of more than 1,400mm
- waste paper, metal, plastic or glass that has been separately collected to prepare it for reuse or recycling
Where you have treated separately collected waste paper, metal, plastic or glass, you may send residual waste from that treatment to a landfill that is permitted to accept it. You must use the waste hierarchy to make your decision.
If you cannot send your waste to landfill you must find another way to recover or dispose of it with reference to the waste hierarchy, for example incineration with energy recovery.
Dispose of gypsum-based wastes
You must not send gypsum-based waste (for example, plasterboard) to a landfill cell that accepts biodegradable waste. You must separate it for reuse or recovery to comply with the waste hierarchy. Where you cannot separate it, you must send mixed waste that contains gypsum to a landfill cell that contains no biodegradable waste, for example a stable non-reactive hazardous waste cell. You must classify and characterise the mixed waste that contains gypsum. Test it to confirm it meets waste acceptance criteria leaching limits in the Council Decision annex for a separate cell (see section 2.3 of the Council Decision annex) or landfill for hazardous waste (see section 2.4 of the Council Decision annex).
Classify your waste
Before you recover or dispose of your waste you must decide whether it’s hazardous or non-hazardous. Non-hazardous waste includes inert waste.
Treat waste for landfill
You must normally treat waste before you send it to landfill. For example, reducing the hazard from highly flammable to flammable, or removing polluting substances from non-hazardous waste.
You do not need to treat:
- inert waste where treatment is not technically feasible
- non-hazardous or hazardous waste where treatment would not reduce its quantity or the risk to people’s health or the environment
You can treat waste by separating different types of waste and sending some of it for recycling, reuse or recovery.
Your proposed treatment must do both of the following:
- be a physical, thermal, chemical or biological process including sorting
- change the characteristics of the waste to reduce its volume or hazards or make it easier to handle or recover
The Environment Agency does not consider compaction to be treatment because this does not change the characteristics of the waste. You must confirm in writing to the landfill operator that you have treated your waste. You must describe the product of the treatment as part of the waste’s basic characterisation. If the waste was classified as hazardous before treatment, follow the procedures for reclassifying the treated waste in the waste classification technical guidance. You need to show that the treatment has made the waste acceptable for disposal at the class of landfill you are sending it to. Contact the landfill site to find out what types of waste they are allowed to accept.
Source: Gov.uk
Published: 28th April 2021