Make Sure You Know Your Responsibilities Toward Waste!
1st Mar, 2018
If you’re a business owner, you may well already know your general responsibilities towards waste, especially if you find yourself regularly hiring a skip. To be honest, like a lot of things when it comes to waste disposal, it’s mostly a matter of common sense and decency, so we doubt you’re having trouble as it is. Having said that, there are a couple of specifics that business owners occasionally get tripped up on, so we thought it was worth covering this week on the blog – as well as clueing you into a couple of the ways that we can help!
Your Duty Of Care In A Nutshell
All businesses produce some kind of waste, and certain types are obviously more common than others. Most types of business waste are classed as controlled waste, a category that includes commercial, industrial and household waste. Used paper, rubble, timber, plasterboard and used electrical equipment are all types of waste regularly produced by business across a range of sectors, and all of them fall under ‘controlled waste’.
As a business owner, you have to keep waste to an absolute minimum by doing everything that you can to prevent, reuse, recycle or recover it – in that order! (Incidentally, if you’re looking at new ways to reduce your waste output, you could do worse than checking out our recent blog post on top tips to dealing with corporate waste.)
This also means until you hire a skip, you’ve got to:
- Store waste in a secure place
- Use suitable containers to stop waste escaping or spreading
- Clearly label the containers to indicate what type of waste they contain
- Use covers or weights to stop waste blowing away in high winds or other strong weather
The UK legal system takes this kind of stuff very seriously, and local councils now have new powers to penalise fly tipping and other illegal waste disposal. Firstly this comes in the form of fines and fixed penalty notices, but that’s not to mention the PR damage it does for your business, both in the eyes of your customers and business partners. All the more reason for your business to think about your corporate social responsibility. Happily, we’re here to help!
We’re The Top Choice For Commercial Waste Disposal
As you might have guessed from our name, at Skip Hire Network we’re pretty good at shipping waste off your premises. We don’t just take to landfill, though. First, we take it to our very own processing facility, where we sort through it for anything that can be reused or recycled. We’re passionate about the environment here at Skip Hire Network, and our responsible waste disposal practices are part of the reason why we’re such favourites of household names like Vodafone, United Utilities and Forest Holidays.
As you might imagine, we’re pretty careful about filling in the right forms and ticking all the right boxes – we don’t want to open you up to anything that you might get into trouble. According to the law, you need to fill in a Waste Transfer Note, so we make sure we provide you with one when we arrive, and that we fill in our side of it thoroughly too!
To find out more about how we help business owners at Skip Hire Network, you can check out the commercial waste management page on our website. Or, if you want to get started immediately, all you have to do is enter in your postcode and phone number onto the homepage of our website for an instant skip hire quote!