Your obligations under Digital Waste Tracking (DWT), and your deadline, depend entirely on your role in the waste chain. Find yourself below.
Receivers and site operators
Mandatory from 1 October 2026, or 1 January 2027 in Scotland. This is you if you run a permitted or licensed site that takes waste in: a transfer station, MRF, treatment site, landfill, energy from waste, anaerobic digestion, composting site or scrap yard. You create the record and generate the tracking ID for every load received, and you pay the 26 pounds charge per legal entity, per year.
Carriers and transporters
Mandatory from October 2027, but your real deadline is October 2026. You record the waste movements you transport. Because receiving sites must log your details from October 2026, they will ask you for clean digital handover data a year before your own mandate. Loads without it can be refused at the gate.
Brokers and dealers
Mandatory from October 2027. You record the movements you arrange, with your registration and authorisation numbers attached to each record.
Producers of waste
No separate start date, but you are exposed now. Your duty of care is unchanged: accurate descriptions, correct EWC codes and quantities. The difference is that under DWT a wrong description is visible in a connected digital record, so duty of care failures are easier to spot. Expect your carriers to ask for data in digital formats.
Still not sure
If you take waste in at a permitted site, you are almost certainly in Phase 1 and your deadline is October 2026. If you only move or arrange waste, you are Phase 2 on paper but should act sooner. If in doubt, start a chat with us and tell us what your site does, and we will point you to the right deadline.
The free way to find out where you stand: the public beta lets you log a few real movements now, at no cost, and see exactly what DWT will ask of you.