European waste regulations require greater traceability and more reliable data. Monika Kubik, a TEIMAS Zero expert, examines how companies can improve compliance and waste management.
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By Monika Kubik, Account Executive for TEIMAS Zero in Poland.
Companies have never had more information about their waste. Yet many still struggle to answer some remarkably basic questions about it.
Where did it go? What treatment did it receive? How much was actually recycled? Which sites are performing best? What materials are being lost instead of recovered?
The problem now is fragmentation.
Information is distributed across transfer documents, spreadsheets, waste contractors, local systems and facilities operating under different processes and regulatory requirements.
For years, organisations could tolerate that fragmentation because waste information was largely treated as documentation. Today, this has changed.
Europe is changing what waste compliance requires.
The revised EU Waste Shipment Regulation, together with DIWASS, the EU’s Digital Waste Shipment System, reflects the shift towards electronic procedures and greater traceability for waste in the EU.
The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) strengthens requirements around recyclability, recycled content, reuse and waste prevention. The revised Waste Framework Directive introduces new Extended Producer Responsibility requirements for textiles and footwear, alongside binding food waste reduction targets. And the Batteries Regulation strengthens traceability and responsibility throughout the battery life cycle.
Different obligations, but a common direction. More traceability, more structured information and greater accountability across the value chain.
For organisations, this creates a significant challenge.
One facility may rely on spreadsheets, another on a contractor portal and another on locally stored documents. Add different countries, contractors, waste streams and coding systems, and creating a reliable corporate view becomes increasingly difficult.
A company can have thousands of waste records and still lack a clear understanding of its waste.
Supply-chain disruption and geopolitical uncertainty have forced Europe to reconsider its dependence on external sources of critical materials. Circularity is increasingly connected to industrial resilience.
The EU Critical Raw Materials Act, for example, sets a benchmark for the EU to develop recycling capacity equivalent to at least 25% of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials by 2030, while reducing excessive dependence on individual third countries. This changes how we should look at waste.
Today’s waste may contain tomorrow’s raw materials. But organisations cannot manage resources they cannot see. Without reliable traceability, how can a company know whether potentially valuable materials are being recovered, lost or disposed of? How can it compare recycling performance across facilities, identify inefficient waste streams or understand whether contractors are delivering the expected outcomes?
Having data is not enough. Organisations need to be able to trust it.
Incomplete records, duplicated information, incompatible coding systems and manual validation weaken every analysis built on top of them. Better dashboards or more sophisticated analytics cannot compensate for unreliable source data.
There is another problem: waste traceability is often reconstructed after the event. At the end of the month or year, documents are collected, spreadsheets reconciled and missing information requested from sites and contractors.
By then, every discrepancy is harder to resolve.
A missing weight, an inconsistent waste code or a document stored in somebody’s inbox may seem minor. Multiply those issues across thousands of waste movements and dozens of facilities, and they become a significant operational problem.
Traceability cannot simply be reconstructed before an audit. It needs to exist while the waste is moving, when it is produced, collected, transported, received, recovered or disposed of.
The same principle applies to digitalisation.
Turning paper into PDFs is useful, but PDFs are still documents. Genuine digitalisation means creating structured information that can be validated, exchanged, analysed and integrated with other systems.
A document can tell you what happened to one waste movement. Structured data can help you understand what is happening across thousands of them.
Traditionally, organisations have asked: Have we complied?
That question remains essential. But reliable waste data allows them to ask more valuable ones.
Where are we losing recoverable materials? Why does one site recycle more than another? Which waste streams generate the highest costs? What emissions are associated with our waste operations? Could materials currently treated as waste become secondary resources?
These are management questions.
At TEIMAS, after almost 18 years developing technology exclusively for the waste sector and digitalising millions of waste transfer documents every year, we have seen this transition first-hand.
Organisations need a reliable way to connect waste operations across sites, contractors and countries while giving headquarters visibility, without preventing facilities from operating locally.
That is the challenge we designed TEIMAS Zero to address: a specialised waste software that provides organisations with complex waste operations with the control, traceability and reliable data they need to make better decisions. Today, almost 40 companies across 11 countries use Zero, including leading organisations such as Telefónica or Iberdrola.
Behind every waste record there is a material, a cost, a responsibility and potentially a resource that could return to productive use.
Waste data used to be something organisations put in a report.
Now it can tell you where you are losing money, what is not working and what you can do better.
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