Who signs a waste transfer note?
Two people sign a waste transfer note: the one handing the waste over, and the one receiving it. On a skip yard or transfer station you are nearly always the second of those, signing for a load that has just come through the gate.
Both sides of the handover sign
A waste transfer note is a record of one movement agreed by two parties. The party giving the waste up signs, and the party taking it on signs, and each keeps a copy of the same note. In the wording used around duty of care those two are the transferor and the transferee. At a permitted transfer station you are the transferee on almost every load that arrives, and the transferor on everything you send out again.
What goes beside the signature
A squiggle on its own identifies nobody. The person signing is doing it on behalf of a business, so the note needs their name in print, the job they do, and the name of the company they sign for. The carrier's registration number sits elsewhere on the note rather than inside the signature, and it is worth checking it against the lorry rather than taking the driver's word at the weighbridge.
It follows the waste, not the order
Who holds the pen depends on who physically has the waste at the moment it changes hands, not on who ordered the skip or who pays the invoice. A builder who tips their own van signs for themselves. A skip coming back on your own lorry has already been taken on by your firm as carrier, so the signing happened at the job, not in the yard.
The record keeps the same names as the handover
Signing is an act between two businesses. What the register has to show afterwards is the same thing the note showed: the waste, the code, the quantity, the carrier and their registration, and where it went next. Skiplog is built to hold those EA mandated fields on every note, so the copy handed over at the weighbridge and the record the office keeps tell the same story when someone asks about a load months later.
When a load arrives with nothing signed
Record what came in while the lorry is still in front of you: the waste, the code, the weight, the carrier and their registration, and the date. Then chase the missing note rather than letting the gap sit in the register until the quarter closes. A load you can describe is a far better position than a load nobody wrote down. The questions below are the ones a yard starts asking once these distinctions matter.
Who signs as which party on a typical yard
| The movement | Signs as transferor | Signs as transferee |
|---|---|---|
| A builder tips a van load at your gate | The builder, for their own firm | Your weighbridge operator, for the site |
| Another firm's lorry delivers a mixed load | That firm's driver, naming the company and its registration | Your weighbridge operator, for the site |
| Your own skip comes back from a job | The customer at the job, when your driver took it on | Your firm, as the carrier who then brought it in |
| You send residual waste on to another site | Whoever signs for your yard | The receiving site's operator |
| A skip collected weekly on a season ticket | The customer, once, at the start of the period | Your yard, once, on the same note |
Questions
Who is the transferor and who is the transferee?
The transferor is whoever is giving the waste up at that point in its journey, which could be the producer, a carrier who has already taken it on, or a site passing it onward. The transferee is whoever takes it on next, which for a skip yard means the yard itself. Both sign the same note and both keep a copy of it. A single load can be transferred several times before it is treated, and each handover is its own note with its own pair of signatures.
Can the skip lorry driver sign instead of the customer?
A driver can sign, but only for the party they actually represent. If your firm's lorry has taken the waste on at a job, your driver is signing as the transferee at the roadside and then your firm is the transferor at the yard gate. A driver signing on a customer's behalf should be able to say whose authority they have, and that is better agreed when the skip is booked than argued about at the weighbridge. Either way, the firm named beside the signature should be the firm that held the waste.
Who signs for the yard when a load arrives?
Anyone the site has authorised to act for it, which in practice is the weighbridge operator or the site manager. It is worth deciding who that is in advance rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be nearest the cab. Their printed name and position are what makes the signature mean something months later, when an inspector asks who accepted a load. If two people share the weighbridge across a shift, each should sign the loads they took, so the printed name says which of them it was.
Does the signature prove the EWC code and weight are correct?
No. Signing records that both parties agreed to the transfer as described, not that the description is accurate. The waste description, the List of Waste code and the quantity are still your responsibility to get right, and a signed note with the wrong code on it is a wrong record that has been agreed twice. If something is mistyped, it is far easier to put straight before the quarter closes and the return goes out than to explain it afterwards.
Does the person receiving the waste need to check the carrier's registration?
Checking who you are accepting waste from is part of the duty of care a receiving site carries, and the carrier's registration number belongs on the note in its own field. A lapsed registration is not cured by a signature. The separate page on CBDU numbers explains what the number looks like and how it is structured, and there is a duty of care page covering what a receiving site is expected to satisfy itself about.
Who signs a season ticket covering repeat collections?
The same two parties sign, once, at the start of the period the note covers, and the note then stands for repeat collections of the same waste from the same place. The collections themselves still need recording against it, so the paperwork does not stop after the signature. The season ticket page in this section covers how long one can run and what it has to describe.
Who reports the load to Defra's waste tracking service?
Signing the handover and reporting the load are two separate jobs, and they are often two different people. The signature happens at the weighbridge; reporting the loads your site takes in to Defra's receipt of waste service is usually done by whoever does the yard's paperwork. Skiplog is built to produce those receipt rows in the column order Defra's spreadsheet asks for, exporting only the rows that pass its checks, for your yard to upload. After a download it asks whether the batch went to Defra, records who confirmed it, and holds the Defra reference each load came back with, while the dashboard lists the loads not yet reported as overdue, due today or due tomorrow against a two working day deadline.
Where does Skiplog fit if it does not take a signature?
Skiplog is made to carry the record, not the pen. It is built so a transfer note with the EA mandated fields, waste type, code, quantity, carrier details and destination, can be completed on a tablet in under two minutes, saved on the device first with a visible queued, syncing or synced status, and sent on its own when the signal comes back. A quarter then exports as one CSV in the column layout your area office asks for. It is made to help your yard meet what the rules ask of it; the signing step and the compliance outcome stay with the parties to the transfer.