Phase 1 is the first stage of DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking (DWT) mandate, and it lands on receiving sites. If you take waste in at a permitted or licensed site, this is the phase that affects you, and the deadline is close.
Who is in Phase 1
Phase 1 applies to permitted and licensed waste receiving sites, around 12,000 of them in England. That includes:
Transfer stations and materials recovery facilities (MRFs)
Treatment sites, landfill and energy from waste
Anaerobic digestion and composting sites
Scrap yards
What Phase 1 requires you to do
As a receiver you are the site that creates the record. For every load you take in, you:
Create the digital waste record
Generate the unique Digital Waste Tracking ID (DWT-ID) for that load
Submit it to DEFRA's Receipt of Waste API
Pay the charge of 26 pounds per legal entity, per year
When it starts
1 October 2026: mandatory for receiving sites in England, Wales and Northern Ireland
1 January 2027: mandatory for receiving sites in Scotland
Now: the public beta is open and voluntary, so you can test before the deadline
Why receivers go first
Receiving sites are the natural control point in the chain. Waste is already weighed and logged at the gate, so capturing it digitally there creates a reliable record that everything upstream can be checked against.
How LoadSnap handles Phase 1
LoadSnap is built for the receiver duty. A photo of the load is classified by AI against more than 850 EWC codes, you review and approve the record, and LoadSnap submits it straight to the DEFRA API and stores the returned tracking reference against the record. No double keying, no codes to memorise. Carrier licences are checked against the Environment Agency register as part of the same flow.
Start before the deadline. You do not have to wait for the mandate to switch on. Logging receipts digitally now builds your audit trail and the habit, so day one is a non-event.