Whether it applies to you
If your business produces waste similar in nature to household waste — food, paper, cardboard, packaging, textiles, timber — you are in scope. That covers offices, shops, cafés, restaurants, hotels, schools, care homes and most light industrial premises.
If your waste is inert (the heavy stuff — rubble, concrete, brick and soil) — soil, rubble, concrete, hardcore — you are not. That material does not rot, does not produce methane, and can still be landfilled. Our soil removal and concrete and rubble removal services are unaffected.
- In force since 31 December 2025
- Covers municipal-type business waste
- Food, card, paper, timber, textiles
- Inert waste is not covered
- Segregation at source is the answer
- Transfer notes matter more than ever
Why mixed waste got more expensive
Landfill was always the cheapest disposal route for mixed general waste, because it required no processing. Closing it to biodegradable material means that waste now has to go somewhere that costs more to run — recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion (breaking food down without air to make gas and fertiliser) or energy recovery.
That cost lands on whoever produced the waste. A business that presents one mixed bin is paying for the most expensive possible treatment of everything in it, including the cardboard that would have been free to recycle and the food waste that has its own cheaper route.
Segregation is not an environmental gesture at this point. It is the cheaper option, and the gap widens as alternative treatment capacity fills up.
Split your streams, cut your bill
Segregated commercial collections with no bin hire and no minimum term. Send us your volumes.
What to actually change
Start with the two heaviest streams you produce. For most retail and hospitality that is cardboard and food waste; for offices it is paper and packaging; for trades it is timber and metal. Separating just those two usually removes the majority of the tonnage from your general bin.
Then look at what is left. A general bin that is genuinely residual — the material with no better route — is small, and cheap to collect. A general bin full of card and food is neither.
Our commercial waste collection runs on separated streams for exactly this reason, with no bin hire and no minimum term, so you can change the arrangement as your volumes change.
The transition, honestly
Scotland's alternative treatment capacity is not all built. Additional energy-from-waste facilities are expected to come online between 2026 and 2027, and SEPA has published a temporary regulatory position statement indicating it will not enforce the ban for up to two years under defined conditions while that capacity arrives.
Do not read that as a reprieve. The direction is fixed, the ban is law, and the businesses that reorganise during the transition period will be the ones not scrambling when it ends. The full detail is in Scotland's landfill ban explained.
Your paperwork got more important
Where waste goes now matters more than it did, and the duty-of-care transfer note is the record of it. Businesses must keep these and produce them on request, and 'the contractor has them' is not an answer.
Every collection we make comes with a transfer note under our SEPA registration, WCR/R/3002381, filed and reissued on request. For anyone tendering or reporting on ESG, we also supply diversion-from-landfill figures per project — see our commercial waste collection page for how that works.
