A facilities manager on Bunhill Row, EC1Y, rang me one February morning about a letter from the Environment Agency. Someone had fly-tipped eleven bags of office waste in a lay-by off the A121 near Waltham Abbey, and one of those bags held a delivery note with his building’s address printed across the top. He had tipped nothing. He had paid a man with a Transit £70 a week to take the bins away, cash, no paperwork, an arrangement inherited from a caretaker who left in 2023. The Agency showed very little interest in who had driven to Waltham Abbey. Their interest was in who produced the waste and whether that producer had taken any steps at all to check where it was going. That question catches more London facilities teams than any other environmental duty, and cleaning operations generate exactly the kind of waste that ends up in the wrong lay-by.

Who carries the legal liability when your cleaning waste leaves the building?

Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 applies to anyone who produces, imports, keeps, treats, transports or disposes of controlled waste. The occupier of the premises is almost always the producer, and the duty does not transfer when the bags go through the loading bay door. It runs alongside the carrier’s duty and the receiving site’s duty. Everyone in the chain holds their own version of it at the same time.

The belief that collection ends your involvement is the single most expensive misunderstanding in commercial property. It survives because nothing goes wrong for years at a stretch.

Here is a position that costs my own business money to state: your cleaning contractor should not hold your waste contract. Plenty of us offer it, and the bundling looks tidy on paper – one invoice, one point of contact, one line in the service specification. What it produces in practice is a producer who has never seen the carrier’s registration, never seen a transfer note, and has no idea which transfer station in Park Royal or Edmonton the bags reach. You have outsourced a duty that cannot be outsourced. When the Agency writes to you, and the letter comes to you rather than to us, “the cleaners arranged it” is not a defence. Buy the collection directly, or at minimum insist on sight of every document in the chain.

What section 34 asks of you in practice

Four things, and none of them takes long. Store the waste so it cannot escape – which in a Southwark basement bin store means lidded containers rather than a slumped heap of sacks against a fire door. Transfer it only to an authorised person. Provide a written description accurate enough that the next holder can handle it lawfully. Keep the transfer note for two years, three years for hazardous consignment notes.

The written description is where cleaning waste falls down. “General waste” describes nothing. A sack containing spent floor stripper concentrate and half a dozen part-used aerosols is misdescribed by that phrase, and misdescription is itself an offence.

How do you check a waste carrier’s registration without taking their word for it?

The Environment Agency runs a free public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers. It takes about ninety seconds to use. Anyone carrying waste produced by other people needs an upper tier registration, and those numbers begin CBDU. Lower tier registration, prefix CBDL, mainly covers businesses moving waste they generated themselves – a plumber running his own job waste to a household waste site.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. A significant number of small clearance operators across outer London advertise themselves as fully licensed while holding a lower tier registration that permits almost nothing they are doing for you. The certificate they email over looks convincing on paper. It is convincing right up to the point where you search the register and find the tier is wrong or the status lapsed eighteen months ago.

Check the receiving site as well. The transfer station or treatment facility needs an environmental permit or a registered exemption, and that sits on the same public register system. A carrier with a valid CBDU number tipping into an unpermitted yard behind Purley Way, CR0, still leaves you exposed.

The three numbers worth writing down

Carrier registration number, permit number of the destination site, vehicle registration of the collecting van. Take a screenshot of the register result, date it, and file it with the quarter’s transfer notes. A dated record of the check is the thing that demonstrates reasonable steps were taken. An undated assurance from a supplier demonstrates nothing.

Set a diary reminder thirty days before the upper tier registration expires. Registrations run for three years and lapse quietly.

Which cleaning wastes are hazardous, and which just feel like they should be?

Most office cleaning generates nothing hazardous. Ready-to-use dilutions of neutral detergent, microfibre cloths, vacuum contents from a Fitzrovia agency floor – ordinary controlled waste, all of it.

The hazardous fraction is small, concentrated, and almost always stored in the wrong cupboard. Solvent-based floor strippers and their rinsings. Strongly acidic descalers used on limescaled urinals and shower screens. Aerosols under pressure, whether full or partly used. Fluorescent tubes and compact lamps changed during a night shift. Sealed lead-acid batteries out of scrubber-driers. Anything containing more than trace quantities of the substances that put a hazard pictogram on the label.

Waste that carries a hazard code needs classifying against the List of Waste, moving under a consignment note rather than a transfer note, and consigning to a site permitted to accept that code. Premises registration for hazardous waste producers in England ended in April 2016, which several long-serving FMs still do not know, and which occasionally means someone is renewing a registration that stopped existing a decade ago.

Then there is offensive waste. Sanitary waste, nappies, incontinence products from a care setting off Uxbridge Road, W7 – non-infectious, non-hazardous, and still requiring its own stream in yellow and black striped sacks rather than the general bin. I have seen washroom units serviced diligently every four weeks by a specialist contractor while the same building’s cleaners emptied the individual cubicle bins straight into the black sack round. Both things were happening in the same building, by the same client’s arrangement, and nobody had noticed.

Where the aerosols and the tubes end up

Aerosols go for puncturing and degassing at a permitted facility. Tubes go to a mercury recovery plant, usually via a WEEE consolidator. Neither costs much per unit, and neither is available from a general refuse round.

A twenty-litre drum of concentrated stripper cannot go in a skip because it is nearly empty. That is worth saying out loud during induction, because someone always tries it.

What happens to the wastewater, which most people forget entirely?

Pressure washing a service yard off Tanner Street, SE1, produces water carrying diesel film, rubber particulate, detergent and whatever the bin store leaked last week. That water goes somewhere. In most London commercial yards it goes into a surface water gully, and surface water gullies discharge to a watercourse without treatment. Causing polluting matter to enter inland freshwaters is an offence under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016, and the Agency does prosecute it.

The alternative route, into the foul drain, needs the sewerage undertaker’s agreement. Thames Water grants trade effluent consents under the Water Industry Act 1991, and certain matter is prohibited from sewers outright under section 111. A one-off exterior wash of a shopfront usually falls below anyone’s threshold. Regular yard washing, wheelie bin cleaning, or any operation with an oil interceptor upstream is a different conversation, and worth having before the operative arrives rather than after.

Carpet extraction slurry is a related problem, handled badly almost everywhere. Recovery tank contents from a full building clean at Stockley Park go down a WC or a designated slop sink. Not the car park drain. Not the nearest gully.

Foul, surface, and a test that takes ten minutes

Buy a sachet of fluorescein dye. Drop it into the gully in question, run water, and walk to the interceptor or the manhole. Building surveys mislabel drainage constantly, particularly on sites extended piecemeal since the 1970s, and the drawing in the O&M manual for a Coronation Road, NW10, industrial unit is not evidence of anything.

Record the result on the site plan. Mark the surface water gullies in a colour, laminate it, and pin it in the janitorial store where the operatives can see it.

What changed for workplace recycling in 2025, and does it catch your building?

Simpler Recycling took effect for workplaces in England on 31 March 2025. Businesses and relevant non-domestic premises with ten or more full-time equivalent employees must present dry recyclables – plastic, metal, glass, paper and card – separately from food waste, and both separately from residual. Paper and card may be collected with the other dry materials where the collector’s arrangements allow it. Micro-firms under ten FTE have until 31 March 2027.

On paper this is a duty on the producer rather than on the cleaning contractor, and it is enforceable by the Environment Agency through compliance notices. It also quietly rewrites the specification for every office cleaning contract in London, because the person who decides whether a coffee cup ends up in the right bin at eight in the evening is a cleaning operative working a two-hour shift across four floors. Bins that are colour-coded but identically shaped get emptied into one wheeled bin at the lift lobby. Sacks that all look the same get consolidated. If the segregation you paid for at the desk collapses at the bin store, you are non-compliant with a full set of correct-looking bins.

Ten employees, and how that number gets counted

The threshold runs across the whole enterprise rather than per site. A recruitment firm with three people at each of four addresses between Farringdon and Croydon is a twelve-FTE business, in scope since March 2025, at every one of those addresses. Volunteers do not count towards the figure.

Landlords running multi-let buildings should assume the requirement bites at building level regardless, since the shared bin store serves whichever tenant happens to be largest.

The Bunhill Row file now opens with a single printed sheet: carrier name, CBDU number, date checked, initials. It sits in front of each quarter’s transfer notes. Producing it takes four minutes every three months.