On March 31, 2025, England will implement new recycling regulations under the “Simpler Recycling” initiative, aiming to standardize waste management across businesses and non-domestic premises. This legislation mandates the separation of specific waste streams to enhance recycling efficiency and environmental sustainability.
Key Requirements
From March 31, 2025, all businesses and non-domestic premises in England are legally required to separate the following waste types:
Businesses generating garden waste must manage it according to the waste hierarchy, opting for recycling or composting to achieve the best environmental outcome.
Micro-firms, defined as workplaces with fewer than 10 full-time employees, have until March 31, 2027, to comply with these requirements.
Health and Safety Considerations
Implementing these waste separation practices necessitates attention to health and safety protocols:
Environmental Impact
Adhering to the new regulations will significantly benefit the environment by:
Fire Safety Measures
Proper waste management also plays a crucial role in fire prevention:
Steps to Compliance
To align with the upcoming regulations, businesses should:
Conclusion
The forthcoming recycling legislation represents a significant step toward environmental sustainability in England. By proactively adapting to these changes, businesses can contribute to a greener future while ensuring compliance with legal requirements.
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Happy New Year! Let’s Start 2025 on the Right Foot
Welcome to a brand-new year! I hope you’ve all had a restful break and are feeling ready to tackle 2025 with fresh energy and purpose.
Before we dive into the goals and challenges ahead, I want to take a moment to reflect on some of the key lessons from 2024. Last year saw some significant health and safety prosecutions that served as stark reminders of the importance of prioritising workplace safety. These cases highlighted what can go wrong when compliance is overlooked and underscored the critical role we all play in maintaining a safe working environment.
But let’s keep it light—this isn’t about finger-wagging; it’s about empowerment. As employers, managers, or team members, we all have a part to play in creating workplaces that are not only legally compliant but also genuinely safe and supportive.
So, as we charge into 2025, let’s remember:
Health and safety isn’t just about avoiding penalties—it’s about building a culture of care and accountability. Over the year, we will be blogging to provide updates to help you stay on top of your responsibilities.
Let’s make this the year of proactive safety and well-being!
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Employers need to consider the impact extreme summer weather may have on the health of employees. While doing so, the employer must also determine the risk control measures that may be required at such times.
Summer 2022 had seen the UK record its highest ever temperature of 40.3°C, with new national records being set in England, Scotland and Wales.
Although the chances of reaching such high temperatures again in the coming years are said to be extremely low, the Met Office has concluded that the UK will, however, see longer periods with temperatures higher than the seasonal norms.
Although many people may enjoy high summer temperatures, for employers periods of excessive heat can present challenges in terms of meeting their health and safety obligations.
The majority of individuals in the UK will be well acclimatised to the usual summer temperatures. However, with climate change impacts, there is the potential for more periods of hot weather above average summer temperatures.
In these circumstances, individuals are less likely to be able to acclimatise to the higher heat levels leading to “thermal discomfort”.
Thermal discomfort is where people start to feel uncomfortable, ie they are too hot but are not made unwell by the conditions. Most people will not suffer medical symptoms due to the discomfort, beyond irritability and tiredness.
However, extreme heat events can cause significant health issues such as heat exhaustion, heat stroke and other heat stress-related illnesses.
Perhaps less well-recorded, exposure to higher temperatures for longer periods of time can increase the risk of injuries as a result of fatigue, lack of concentration, poor decision making, etc.
Other factors to consider could include increased stress levels, increased pollution levels and even increased exposure to hazardous substances where materials/substances react adversely to extreme temperatures.
It is now well-recognised that other factors will impact any adverse effects of extreme heat. This includes relative humidity, air movement, sun exposure, work demands, clothing and metabolic heat. These factors make up what is known as the “human thermal environment”.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) states that “all workers are entitled to an environment where risks to their health and safety are properly controlled. Heat is classed as a hazard and comes with legal obligations like any other hazard”.
Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR), employers must assess the risks to workers and put control measures in place to protect those workers.
The HSE states that “temperature in the workplace is one of the risks you should assess whether the work is being done indoors or outdoors”.
Risks must be controlled to as low as reasonably practicable, which means finding a balance between the cost of reducing the risk and the benefits that brings.
A question often asked when undertaking a risk assessment is whether there is a maximum temperature in which workers are required to work. As the HSE states, “there’s no law for maximum working temperature, or when it’s too hot to work, because every workplace is different”.
It continues by noting that no meaningful upper limit can be imposed because in many indoor workplaces high temperatures are not seasonal but created by work activity, eg in bakeries or foundries.
The employer must, therefore, determine what a reasonably comfortable temperature should be at the workplace based upon the findings of a risk assessment. There can be many inputs into the risk assessment, including:
The HSE has also produced a useful “heat stress checklist” that may help inform an employer’s decision regarding risk control measures.
There is nothing stating what is meant by “comfortable” as what one person deems reasonably comfortable may not be the same as what is deemed reasonably comfortable by another, and this is where difficulties often lie for employers and employees alike.
It is probably the case that during much of the year, workplace temperatures are within a zone that is deemed to be comfortable for the majority of workers and it is only during exceptional periods of heat that workers begin to suffer from thermal discomfort and/or the health effects of heat exposure.
As such, employers may determine that it is necessary to have additional risk control measures adopted to take account of exceptional seasonally hot weather.
This can be based upon the needs of an individual (taking into account the employer has a duty of care to individual employees) or collectively for a group of workers.
In taking this approach, the employer will require a form of “trigger point” that informs them when additional risk control measures may be required due to hot weather.
One tool that may be used is the UK Health Security Agency’s Heat-Health Alert system. Although primarily aimed at the organisations required to undertake public health action, the system does provide useful information.
From summer 2023, Heat-Health Alerts transitioned to an impact-based alerting, which provides users with information over and above the fact that hot weather is likely to occur. It gives an indication of the impacts likely to be observed as a result of the temperatures. The alerts are given a colour, as shown below.
In conjunction with the above, the Met Office has the National Severe Weather Warning Service, which is a warning service based on the impact of the UK weather rather than a threshold of the weather itself. Warnings are graded as yellow, amber and red, and, among other matters, give the following information:
Utilising the above information, employers may determine that pre-planned additional risk control measures are necessary to ensure that their employee’s health is not adversely impacted by extreme summer weather.
Summer extreme weather can be said to be foreseeable and as such employers need to consider the impacts this may have on the health of employees.
In doing so, a suitable and sufficient risk should be undertaken to take into consideration the impacts of such weather conditions. In doing so, the employer may determine that additional risk control measures may be required at times of extreme hot weather.
In such cases, suitable planning must be put in place to ensure the risk control measures deemed necessary are implemented. This could be through the use of trigger points such as UK weather warning systems.
In general terms, this could include:
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The importance of health and safety in the workplace can never be underestimated. As well as being written into law, ensuring staff aren’t at risk of injury or illness is also an integral part of being a responsible employer.
Maybe one of the biggest drivers for employers to take workplace health and safety seriously is that it allows you to show your customers and employees that you are committed to a safer workplace. This is one of the many reasons why organisations invest in ISO 45001 certification, the internationally recognised Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Management System Standard, which sets out the requirements for an organisation to ensure a safe and healthy workplace and to prevent work-related accidents and illnesses.
ISO 45001 is a framework that helps businesses to raise the awareness of health and safety risks among their employees as well as create controls that help them to mitigate or remove these risks from the workplace. By doing so, employers can help to keep their staff happy, healthy and safe, reducing the likelihood of absenteeism, injury, mental ill health and breaches of legislation. Not only can this reduce staff turnover, but it can raise your business’ reputation in the marketplace and benefit your bottom line.”
ISO 45001 certification is a fantastic way of presenting your organisation’s commitment to providing a workplace in which the risk of illness and injury to your workers, community or clients is minimised.
Achieving this accreditation in order to make your organisation a safer place to work is also a fantastic way to boost productivity by reducing the number of disruptive incidents. It can also help to boost your workforce’s morale.
The benefits in seven key points:
The certification can be achieved by businesses of any size and it is suitable for all organisations that are looking to improve risk management, protect their reputation and drive productivity at work.
“A robust framework of health and safety processes has meant that businesses with ISO 45001 have had the procedures in place to quickly assess the new risk and its implications for the health and safety of their staff, as well as the means to communicate these risks and what the business planned to do to control them”
How can I gain ISO 45001 certification? What are the requirements?
Gaining ISO 45001 certification is a straightforward process, but it does require you to have some things in place before you start. You also need to be willing to change certain processes if required to gain certification.
For example, you need to determine the internal and external factors that affect your business, communicate roles and responsibilities clearly and adapt/react to changes. Other key actions include:
The most straightforward way to gain ISO certification is through the use of an experienced external party that can assist you in creating, implementing and certifying your ISO 45001 management system. This will help to ensure your organisation has adopted the right processes from the beginning in order to achieve certification quickly.
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Everyone who works for a company needs to know how to work safely and without risks to health. The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 requires you to provide whatever information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of your employees.
This is expanded by the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which identify situations where health and safety training is particularly important, e.g. when people start work, on exposure to new or increased risks and where existing skills may have become rusty or need updating.
Training is essential to the achievements of a business. Perhaps its most positive benefit is better employees. A company develop the potential of an employee, and part of the way a company encourages improvement is through training. Often, good training is just as important as a good benefits package for an employee. Health and safety training is essential in order to stay compliant with current regulations. Training must be provided during working hours and not at the expense of your employees. Special arrangements need to be made for part timers or shift workers.
We can train your employees with mandatory health and safety training as well as additional training to suit your industry. We have teamed up with local companies who can provide in-house training and a company called iHasco who provide online training, they can assist you by providing a package to suit your employee needs and your pocket!
Online training offers clients the benefit of training without losing staff for hours at a time. The courses are easy to complete online and a certificate is downloaded for records. The benefit of this is that everyone can be taught without it interfering with the business.
IHASCO have a library of courses on offer including health and safety, HR Compliance, Management, Business Compliance and in various sectors. Click the link to their website. IHASCO.
To learn more about making your training simple, speak to Amiiee Park at iHasco and quote ‘WHSS’.
Email: amiiee.park@ihasco.co.uk
Telephone: 01344 947409 EXT. [538] W.
If you would like us to contact the company on your behalf or would like alternative training requirements, please let us know.
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