Nobody.
That is the honest answer in most of the buildings I work in, and it is the reason bin stores are the worst-run room in commercial property. The landlord thinks the managing agent has it. The managing agent thinks it sits in the service charge with the waste contractor. The waste contractor collects what is presented and has no view on how it got there. The tenants think it stops being theirs at the office door. And the cleaners, who are the only people who go in there daily, are following whatever instruction they were given by somebody who left two contracts ago.
Meanwhile the law is unambiguous about who is responsible, and it is not the person you would guess from watching the building operate.
Who is the waste producer in a multi-tenant building?
Each tenant is. Waste is produced by the business that generates it, and the duty attaches to the producer at the point of production. A firm on the third floor that fills six sacks a day with paper, coffee grounds and sandwich packaging is a waste producer with duties under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, whatever arrangements exist downstairs.
Those duties are to store waste securely, to prevent its escape, to transfer it only to an authorised person, and to describe it accurately enough for the next holder to handle it lawfully. They do not evaporate because somebody else booked the collection.
The bag has an owner, and the owner is the business that filled it.
The service charge does not transfer the duty
Most London multi-lets run a building-wide waste contract, arranged by the managing agent and recharged through the service charge. That arrangement is sensible and it is what I would recommend to any agent. What it does not do is move the legal duty off the tenant.
The tenant is still transferring waste to somebody. If that transfer is not covered by a documented arrangement naming them, they have a gap. The usual fix is straightforward: the building’s waste transfer documentation should list the tenants whose waste is covered, and each tenant should hold a copy of the paperwork covering their own material.
I have asked to see that paperwork in perhaps thirty buildings over the years. It existed and covered the tenants properly in a handful.
What does duty of care require of a tenant who never touches a bin?
Three things, none of them difficult.
Check that whoever removes the waste is registered to do so. Waste carriers appear on the Environment Agency’s public register, it is free to search, and checking takes about a minute. A managing agent should have done this; a tenant relying on the agent should have evidence that they did.
Describe the waste properly. For ordinary office material this is not onerous, but food waste, confidential shredding, electrical items and anything from a workshop or kitchen all behave differently in the paperwork, and a description of “general waste” covering all of it is inaccurate.
Keep the records. Waste transfer notes are retained for two years, hazardous waste consignment notes for three. An annual transfer note covering a regular collection of the same material is permitted and is what most buildings run on, which means the whole obligation amounts to one document a year and a place to keep it.
Where the paperwork breaks in practice
The break is almost always at the handover between building and tenant rather than between building and waste contractor. The waste contractor’s paperwork is usually in order, because that is their regulated business and the Environment Agency knows where they live.
What is missing is anything showing which tenants are covered, from what date, for what materials. Tenants come and go, the schedule attached to the waste contract was written in 2019, and the coffee roastery that took the ground floor unit last year is presenting a waste stream nobody has documented. If an inspector asks, the agent produces a contract and the tenant produces nothing.
The bag has an owner, and paperwork is how that ownership gets proved after the fact.
Why does the shared bin store fail?
Because segregation is a behaviour, not a bin.
Since 31 March 2025, workplaces in England with ten or more full-time equivalent employees have had to present dry recyclables and food waste separately from residual waste. Dry recyclables means plastic, metal, glass, paper and card, with paper and card often kept apart from the rest depending on what the collector will take. Micro-firms with fewer than ten full-time equivalent staff come into scope on 31 March 2027, and the headcount is counted across the organisation rather than per site, so a small London office belonging to a larger company was in scope from the start.
In a single-occupier building this is a manageable internal exercise. In a multi-let with eleven tenants, a shared store and a propped door, one tenant tipping food waste into the dry recyclable bin contaminates the load for everybody. The contaminated load is rejected or recharged at residual rates, and the cost goes into the service charge, where it is spread across the tenants who did it correctly.
Nobody is ever identified, because nobody watches the door.
The residential bins next door
Mixed-use blocks are worse, and London is building a great many of them. Flats and offices in the same structure, often sharing a service yard, with the residential waste collected by the local authority and the commercial waste on a private contract.
Commercial waste in a residential bin is unlawful, and it happens constantly, usually without anybody intending it. A small office on the ground floor of a residential block finds the flats’ bin store nearer than their own, and a cleaner carrying six bags at seven in the evening takes the shorter walk. The council’s collection crew then takes trade waste it is not contracted to take, and the block’s residents pay for the overflow.
If you manage one of these buildings, the two stores need to be physically separate and obviously labelled, and the commercial store needs to be the convenient one. Design out the shortcut or you will be policing it forever.
Is your cleaning contractor allowed to move the waste?
Within the building, yes. A cleaner carrying bags from an office to the bin store is moving a producer’s waste around the producer’s own premises, which is not carriage.
Off site is a different matter, and here I will say something about my own trade that it would rather I did not. A cleaning firm that loads waste into a van and takes it away needs to be a registered waste carrier, and a substantial number of small operators doing exactly that are not. It comes up most on one-off jobs: a clearance, a strip-out, an end-of-tenancy where the outgoing tenant leaves furniture behind. The cleaning crew loads it up, and where it goes next is a question nobody asks until it turns up dumped on a verge with an invoice in one of the bags.
Ask your contractor for their waste carrier registration number before they remove anything from your site. If they hesitate, that tells you what you needed to know.
What “removal of waste” means in a specification
Cleaning specifications use the phrase constantly and define it almost never.
It should say who moves waste from the office to the store, at what times, into which streams, and who is responsible for presenting the correct containers for collection. It should say who reports a store that is full, blocked or fouled, and to whom. It should say whether the cleaning team handles food waste caddies from the tea points, which is the item most often missed and the one that smells first.
Where none of that is written down, the cleaners do a version of it invented on site by a supervisor, and it works until that supervisor leaves.
Who should own the bin store, and what should the contract say?
One named party, with hours priced against it.
That party can be the cleaning contractor, and often should be, since we are in the building anyway. It can equally be the waste contractor providing a porter, and on a large building with heavy volumes that is frequently cheaper than my hourly rate. I have told agents as much and lost the work, because a dedicated waste porter doing three hours a day is better value than my supervisor doing it badly around a cleaning round.
What cannot happen is the current arrangement in most buildings, where the store belongs to nobody and gets attention when somebody complains.
The store off Chiswick High Road
A managing agent brought us into a mixed-use block off Chiswick High Road, W4, two summers ago. Six commercial units at street level, flats above, and a shared service yard with the residential and commercial bins along the same wall.
The complaint was smell, in July, which is when these complaints arrive. What we found was a food waste caddy from a café being emptied into the residual bin because the food waste bin was consistently full by Tuesday, residual bags stacked outside the containers by two of the offices, and the flats’ bins holding a steady quantity of commercial cardboard.
The fix was not a cleaning fix. Collection frequency for food waste went from weekly to twice weekly, the commercial bins moved to the near end of the yard and the residential to the far end, the store got labelled properly, and each unit got a single side of A4 saying which bin took what. Our contract picked up a fifteen-minute presentation check every morning, priced, written down and assigned to a named person.
The smell went within a fortnight, which is faster than anybody expected and had almost nothing to do with cleaning. What matters more is that when the agent was asked for the building’s transfer documentation last autumn, the schedule listed every tenant and the dates they took occupancy. The bag has an owner, and in that building somebody can now say who.
