Licensing and duty of care

Our registration

We are registered with the Environment Agency as an upper-tier waste carrier, broker and dealer under reference CBDU522854. You can check any carrier's registration free on the Environment Agency's public register — including ours. We would encourage you to.

Check our registration on the public register

Duty of care: the bit most people do not know

Under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, if you produce waste you have a legal duty to make sure it is passed only to someone authorised to take it. That duty does not transfer when the van drives off. It stays with you.

In practice this means: if you pay a man with a van forty quid to take your old kitchen away, and he flytips it on a country lane, the enforcement officers will go through the pile looking for anything with a name on it. If they find yours, you are the one facing a fixed penalty or prosecution — and "I paid someone to take it" is not a defence. Householders have been fined thousands of pounds this way.

How to protect yourself, from anybody

• Ask for the carrier's registration number and check it on the public register.
• Get a waste transfer note for every collection. It is a legal document, not paperwork.
• Be suspicious of a price that is far below everyone else's. Legitimate disposal costs money at the transfer station; if a quote does not cover that, the waste is going somewhere it should not.
• Take a photograph of the vehicle and its registration plate.

That advice applies to hiring anyone, not just us. If a company will not give you a transfer note, do not use them.

What you get from us

A waste transfer note for every job, issued as standard rather than on request, with our carrier registration on it. Keep it for two years — that is the retention period the regulations set.