What Counts as Waste

In everyday language, waste is anything we throw away. In law and in good practice, the idea is similar but more exact. A material becomes waste when its holder throws it away, intends to throw it away, or is required to throw it away. From that moment, rules apply to how it is stored, moved and treated.

This matters because the same object can be a product one day and waste the next. A pallet in use is equipment. A broken pallet put on a scrap pile is waste. A drum of oil is a product; the same drum of used oil from an engine is waste.

Example: the old office chairs

An office replaced its chairs. The old chairs were stacked in a corridor for three months. Nobody planned to use them. They were waste from the day they were replaced, and they also blocked a fire route. A local charity was found that could reuse them, so they were passed on for their original use instead of being thrown away.

Example: the surplus paint

After a painting project, ten part-used tins of paint were left in a store. The maintenance team planned to use them for touch-ups, so they stayed as products, labelled with the date and the project. Two years later the paint had dried in the tins. It was then waste, and hazardous waste at that. Using surplus material soon, or returning it, avoids this.