It’s not the material that decides the category. A cardboard box is a cardboard box whether it’s flattened outside a shop or outside a house. What decides it is where the waste came from. If it’s the by-product of trade, a service, or any other business activity, it’s commercial waste — even when it sits in a bin that looks exactly like a wheelie bin on a residential street.

“Commercial waste” gets used as an umbrella term, but the law splits it out further. Commercial waste covers offices, shops and other trading premises. Industrial waste comes from manufacturing and production processes. Construction and demolition waste comes from building sites. Plenty of London businesses produce a mix of these: a builders’ merchant might generate commercial waste from its shop counter and construction-type waste from the same site, and the collection arrangement needs to reflect that mix rather than treat everything as one stream.

Running a business from a home address doesn’t exempt its waste from the rules. If you pack orders at your kitchen table, print invoices, or store stock in a spare room, the packaging and paperwork from that work is commercial waste, even though it’s produced at a domestic address. The genuinely personal waste from the same household stays separate and carries on going out with the ordinary domestic bin.

Trading doesn’t need a shopfront to count. A market stall or a pop-up stand generates commercial waste for as long as it’s trading, whether that’s a weekend or a single afternoon. Duration doesn’t change the category — the activity does.

Waste left behind after a contractor finishes a job, or by a tenant clearing a unit before handing back the keys, is commercial waste tied to whoever carried out that work or occupied that space. It isn’t the landlord’s household rubbish, and it shouldn’t go out with a residential bin.

No. Government guidance is direct on this: businesses need to arrange their own collection and cannot rely on the household bin service or turn up at a household waste recycling centre with business waste. Household recycling centres are funded and provisioned for domestic use, and putting business waste through either route sidesteps the duty of care that’s meant to apply to it.

Different streams need to be kept apart. General waste, dry mixed recycling, food waste and cardboard are typically collected separately, and glass needs its own stream rather than going in with dry mixed recycling. Getting this right at source makes the collection straightforward and avoids contamination that can turn a recyclable load into general waste.

Waste needs to sit somewhere secure between collections. It shouldn’t block access, and it needs to stay out of reach of the public and of vermin. How it’s stored matters as much as how it’s collected — loose bags left on a pavement overnight cause exactly the problems duty of care is meant to prevent.

Every commercial waste collection should be backed by a written record: a transfer note confirming what was collected, when, and by whom. What that document needs to contain is covered in the guide to waste transfer notes. Keeping those records is part of the duty of care, not paperwork for its own sake.