Waste Definition
Freegle facilitates re-use.
A waste licence is only needed for carrying or receiving waste. Defra (which creates the legislation) has been working with the Environment Agency (which issues licences) to clarify the sometimes murky question of interpretation. The main government document dates from 2012, with a guide to definitions dated 2021: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/legal-definition-of-waste-guidance/decide-if-a-material-is-waste-or-not
The August 2012 Defra document (no longer current, but being superseded in 2024/2025) is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/69590/pb13813-waste-legal-def-guide.pdf
Transfer to another person
- G3.45: Sometimes a person may not have a use for a substance or object, but may know that someone else would. The question is whether wanting to get rid of something makes it waste, or whether someone else having a use for it means it isn't waste. The answer is that simply transferring a substance or object from one person to another doesn't in itself affect its classification as waste.
- G3.46: For example, the Freecycle Network(TM) is a scheme aimed at encouraging people to offer to others, free of charge, goods they no longer have a use for (e.g. a television or personal computer). In many ways this is similar to someone taking clothes to a charity shop. In neither case is the substance or object waste - in both cases it's being transferred with the intention that it should continue to be used for its original purpose (i.e. it's being re-used as non-waste).
- G3.47: However, a TV or PC is classified as waste if a householder takes it to a local authority "civic amenity site". This is because civic amenity sites are facilities that local authorities, as waste disposal authorities, have a duty to provide as places "at which persons resident in its area may deposit their household waste...". The householder's intention in taking the item there is to ensure it can be safely recovered, recycled or disposed of.
Recycled vs reused
Recycling happens to waste; reuse prevents waste.
Legal definitions
- G3.1: Article 3(1) of the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) defines "waste" as "...any substance or object which the holder discards or intends or is required to discard...".
- "'Re-use' means any operation by which products or components that are not waste are used again for the same purpose for which they were conceived."
- "Recycling is any recovery operation by which waste materials are reprocessed into products, materials or substances, whether for the original or other purposes. It includes the reprocessing of organic material but does not include energy recovery and the reprocessing into materials that are to be used as fuels or for backfilling operations."
- "The definition of recycling requires the waste to be reprocessed so as to obtain a product, material or substance, whether for the original or other purposes." "Recycling can only ever be carried out on substances or objects that are classified as waste."
Waste prevention
- "Minimising the quantity (weight and volume) and hazardousness of household-derived waste, generated in a defined community." Includes avoidance, reduction and reuse.
- Cat, Brighton
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