Your Duty of Care and Responsibilities
All businesses produce waste and most types of business waste are classed as controlled waste. Controlled waste includes commercial, industrial and household waste.
You have a legal responsibility to ensure that you produce, store, transport and dispose of controlled waste without harming the environment. This is called your duty of care. The statutory obligations set out as a waste producer includes both private sector businesses such as shops, officers, factories, tradesman (e.g electricians, builders, glaziers and plumbers) and tourism related businesses, including small business as well as public sector services such as schools, hospitals and prisons.
If you are a tradesperson (ie plumber, joiner etc) you also have duty of care obligations under the Scottish Waste Regulations and any waste produced as a result of your work for a householder should not be left with the householder for them to dispose of.
If you are arranging for a tradesman (e.g. builder, landscape gardener, carpet fitter) to carry out work on your property, you have a responsibility for the waste produced because of the work. You should check:
1. That the tradesman will dispose of the waste generated.
2. That they have appropriate authorisation to dispose of the waste eg that they are registered to transport the waste.
If the person who takes the waste from you is not authorised to do so, or your waste is illegally disposed of (e.g. fly tipped), you could be prosecuted and fined if you have not taken all reasonable measures to meet your duty of care obligations.
Where you might rely on customer participation to separate materials for recycling such as an airport, hospital or sports facility, it is expected that reasonable steps are taken to provide customers with suitable facilities to separate materials for recycling aligned to those materials collected on Orkney such as paper and thin card, glass, metal cans and plastic bottles.
For more information about your responsibilities under the Duty of Care/Code of Practice for Scotland please visit the link in the 'Related Sites' section of this page.
