Devon's trade green waste shutdown is a Digital Waste Tracking signal, not a Devon story

A Devon councillor has raised fly-tipping fears after her county ended its trade garden waste scheme at household recycling centres. The scheme stopped on September 15 and a resident running a gardening business told Cllr Ruth Williams there is now nowhere legal to drop the clippings. The Devon story is local. The rule driving it is not.

The Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 came into force on October 1. Every permitted site that receives controlled waste now has to report details of what it takes in. For a council tip taking the occasional van load from a gardener, that extra reporting was not worth it. Devon's waste officer, Iain Stevens, told the Strategic Waste Committee at County Hall on October 21 that it wouldn't have made sense to continue with the trade scheme once the digital tracking rules landed.

Why this reaches London, Surrey and the Thames Valley

Digital Waste Tracking is national. Every council in England is working out whether a historic trade scheme at a household recycling centre still pays its way under the new reporting load. Some will withdraw quietly, as Devon has done. Others will restrict volumes or tighten rules on specific streams such as cardboard or garden waste. Businesses in our patch should assume access can change on a council's timetable, not their own.

The fly-tipping risk falls on the business owner

Cllr Williams asked the committee what a gardener is supposed to do if the local tip no longer accepts trade waste. The committee was told that affected traders had been given alternative disposal arrangements. In practice, those alternatives are either a chargeable trade waste collection from a district, city or borough council, or a private commercial operator. The compliance risk sits with the business that produced the waste. Under the duty of care, if you cannot evidence lawful disposal, the enforcement comes back to you, not to the person who took the material away.

What a business should do

• Check that whoever moves your waste holds a current waste carrier licence and will issue waste transfer notes on request.
• If you have been using a council recycling centre as part of your routine, confirm the scheme is still open for trade users and for your specific waste stream.
• Ask your contractor how the sites it uses report under Digital Waste Tracking. The rules cover permitted waste-receiving sites, not only council tips.
• Segregate at source. Clean paper and card, glass and food travel further and cost less to process than a mixed load.

FJL does roughly 190,000 collections a year across West London, Surrey and the Thames Valley, moving around 10,000 tonnes with 100 per cent landfill diversion. On the scheduled side alone we serve 1,065 customers with 195,000 visits a year, emptying 386,000 bins over the year and about 7,400 a week. The mix on those rounds runs 56 per cent general waste, 31 per cent paper and card, 7 per cent glass and 4 per cent food. The food line is the one moving fastest. We now run 211 food waste services, and 63 per cent of them started on or after the Simpler Recycling date of 31 March 2025.

None of that solves the problem for a Devon gardener. It does tell a West London restaurant, a Surrey office or a Thames Valley workshop that there is a licensed operator in the region already segregating and already covering the waste streams their own council may soon stop taking.