BSI to look into reducing recycling and waste regulatory burdens

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The British Standards Institution (BSI) is leading a project to see if a standardisation roadmap can be created that will reduce the regulatory burden on recycling and waste companies.

BSI will work with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the Environment Agency, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service and Waste Watch as the first step to producing the roadmap.

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This project team, will look to answer the following questions to work out what role standards should play in helping industry demonstrate compliance with the current permitting regime, such as Environmental Permitting Regulations, in an efficient manner:

  • What standards exist that do and/or could support compliance with waste regulation and waste permits?
  • What schemes already exist to support compliance with waste regulations and waste permits?
  • What are the standards gaps?
  • What standards could be developed to assist industry in demonstrating compliance with waste regulations and waste permits?
  • How can standards further support waste regulation and enable industry to comply with it effectively and efficiently?
  • How effective are the existing tools and mechanisms with regards to advising waste management permitting?
  • What specific compliance issues faced by the industry can be resolved with the aid of standards?
  • What cost savings and other benefits can be achieved according to industry?

BSI will undertake research to try to find out the answer s to these questions. This research will then be used to interact with individual industries across the wider waste management sector selected on the basis of agreed selection criteria such as amount of waste produced, amount of regulation in the sector and current usage of standards and certification.

The idea behind it is to see whether waste regulatory burdens can be reduced, identify which operations may be suitable for lighter touch regulation, promote adherence to standards as a means of providing a high degree of assurance of compliance with waste regulations and help the Environment Agency to focus on poor performance and illegal activity rather than on managed businesses.