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Environmental legislation

Air emissions

Waste management and minimisation

• Introduction
• What is waste?
• Duty of Care
• Hazardous waste
• Producer responsibility
• Packaging (Essential Requirements)
• Waste electrical equipment
• Restriction on hazardous equipment
• Landfill tax
• Waste minimisation

Water and land management

Energy and transport management

Environmental Management Systems

Introduction

Society often views waste as a valueless substance and this can lead to a lack of effort by waste producers in their treatment and disposal of waste. However, waste has the potential to have an extremely high negative value for waste producers due to:

• Cost of production
• Legal liability

All waste has the potential to adversely affect the environment; by contaminating the air, water and soil, and causing nuisance such as odour and litter. As a result there is a Duty of Care on all waste producers to ensure that waste is correctly handled and treated on site. Waste producers also retain some degree of responsibility even after the waste has been passed into the care of others, which means that sites should check up on carriers and disposal sites.

Whilst we tend to take waste production for granted, it should be remembered that waste disposal is essentially the throwing away of raw materials. For example, sites pay for raw timber to be delivered, spend time and effort in processing, throw 40 to 80% of the timber into a skip and then pay someone else to take it away.

Therefore waste minimisation at source is desirable from an economic and an environmental perspective in line with the waste management hierarchy (as discussed later).