Environmental guidance for your business in Northern Ireland & Scotland
If you run a business or operate any other activity then the Duty of Care applies to you. You have the responsibility to ensure that you produce, store, transport and dispose of your waste without harming the environment.
You must:
In Northern Ireland and Scotland you have a duty to present glass, metal, plastic, paper, and card (including cardboard) for separate collection. Speak to whoever collects your waste and find out how they organise this.
If you are a food business, i.e. you carry out activities related to processing, distribution, preparation or sale of food, and you produce more than 5kg of food waste per week (about one kitchen caddy full) then you must present food waste for separate collection.
In Scotland if you operate in a Rural Area, as defined by the Scottish Government, you do not have to present food waste for separate collection.
Northern Ireland:
NIEA: Duty of Care – A Code of Practice
NIEA: Food waste – Are you compliant?
Scotland:
Scottish Government: Duty of care - a code of practice
NetRegs: Duty of Care for waste (Scotland) leaflet (PDF - 997KB)
NetRegs: Duty of Care - your waste responsibilities
You should try and minimise the waste generated by your activities. It can be very useful to measure the types of waste you produce by carrying out a waste audit.
This will allow you to identify where waste is coming from in your organisation, and then you can take steps to reduce these waste streams. As well as paying for waste disposal, you are usually paying for the materials that you are disposing of. Reducing waste at source can cut your operational costs.
You can get help to reduce waste, including food waste, construction waste and general waste: In Scotland from Resource Efficient Scotland and In Northern Ireland from WRAPNI.
Resource Efficient Scotland: Reduce waste
Reduce, reuse recycle your business waste
All businesses and projects will produce some waste with hazardous properties. In Scotland this is known as special waste, in Northern Ireland as hazardous waste.
Examples include:
You must keep waste with hazardous properties separate from other waste, and usually separate from other types of hazardous/special waste. You can store a certain amount of hazardous/special waste on your site for a maximum of 12 months before it is removed. You must also:
Keep a list of all the types of hazardous/special waste you store on site.
When you want to have it removed, make sure all hazardous/special waste is:
NetRegs: Hazardous/special waste
Groundwater in Northern Ireland, DAERA have produced a leaflet to raise awareness about this untapped resource
EU Exit, EU Exit useful information
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