Waste operators face 1 October digital tracking deadline
Digital waste tracking becomes mandatory for permitted waste receivers in England and Wales on 1 October, with Scotland following in January 2027. A Strathaven software founder says the hard part is the sites with no mobile signal.
From 1 October, permitted waste receivers in England and Wales must record waste movements through DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking system. Scotland follows in January 2027.
That puts a deadline on an industry that, by the account of the people selling software into it, still runs on paper.
Alastair Mackie founded WasteSync in Strathaven, South Lanarkshire, to file those records automatically. He told Business Matters that waste facilities and transfer stations frequently sit in connectivity blackspots where standard mobile signal drops out entirely.
His argument is that compliance software which assumes a live connection is useless at the gate. WasteSync is built offline-first, he says: crews log movements and verify loads without a signal, and records sync to DEFRA and SEPA once the connection returns.
The company says it passed all 14 of DEFRA's test cases in July and has been approved to connect to the live system. That is WasteSync's own account of its status.
In June, on the same account, it demonstrated the product for the first time to a Scottish local authority and an electrical waste processor. Both watched a load captured offline, and both agreed to pilot it. Neither has been named.
Mackie is not a lifelong waste man. He took a law degree in Edinburgh, moved into advertising sales, served as a director in an SME, completed an MBA at Strathclyde and then spent more than a decade in senior management and private banking.
He was leading AI and digital innovation work at Lloyds Banking Group when he decided to leave. He says the catalyst was seeing how much friction could be stripped out of paper-heavy sectors.
He won the Strathclyde Inspire 100 competition in June. His co-founder is Iain Baxter.
The product pitch he gives is deliberately small: save an administrator two hours of rekeying, remove duplicate records, protect a licence holder during an audit. In his words, bad data is worse than no data.
For operators, the practical question before October is who files the record when the yard has no signal and a truck is waiting. Paper tickets and spreadsheets will not satisfy the mandate, and the mandate does not move for connectivity.
For founders selling into regulated sectors, the timing is the lesson. A statutory deadline creates a buyer with both authority and budget, which is more than most markets offer. It also fixes the date by which the software has to work.