UK Waste Carrier Licence Monitor

Hired a skip firm, a house clearance company, or a waste contractor? If you cannot show you checked they were a registered waste carrier, you can be fined an unlimited amount even if you had no idea they were unlicensed. This Actor checks the Environment Agency's public register in seconds, and can keep checking it for you on a schedule so a licence that lapses next month does not become your problem next month.

The legal exposure this covers

Section 34(1) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 puts a duty of care on "any person who imports, produces, carries, keeps, treats or disposes of controlled waste" to take "all such measures applicable to him in that capacity as are reasonable in the circumstances", including, on transfer of the waste, to secure that it goes "only to an authorised person or to a person for authorised transport purposes." Handing your waste to an unregistered carrier fails that duty. Ignorance is not a defence, the duty is to check, not to hope.

The Environment Agency's own public register (environment.data.gov.uk) is the official source. It has no bulk lookup, no alerts, and no way to ask "has anything changed since I last checked." That is the gap this Actor fills.

Upper tier vs lower tier, in plain English

• Upper tier: the carrier moves other people's waste (or their own construction/demolition waste) as part of their business. This is what most skip hire firms, house clearance companies, and commercial waste contractors need. Upper tier registrations expire and must be renewed every 3 years.
• Lower tier: mostly for businesses that only carry their own waste (e.g. a shop taking its own packaging to be recycled) or certain categories like waste brokers who never physically handle it. Lower tier registrations are indefinite, they do not expire.

Both tiers appear on the same public register. This Actor returns which tier a registration holds and, for upper tier, how close it is to expiry.

Example: a real registration, pulled live

Input

{ "registrationNumber": "CBDU370419" }

Output

{
  "registrationNumber": "CBDU370419",
  "registeredBusinessName": "RITEMIX LIMITED",
  "companyNumber": "03091351",
  "licenceType": "upper_tier",
  "registrationTypeLabel": "Carrier, Broker, Dealer",
  "registrationStatus": "active",
  "registrationDate": "2023-12-11",
  "expiryDate": "2027-01-20",
  "daysUntilExpiry": 161,
  "indefiniteRegistration": false,
  "expiryBand": "ok",
  "registeredAddress": "RITEMIX, HALTWHISTLE, NE49 0ND",
  "sourceUrl": "https://environment.data.gov.uk/public-register/waste-carriers-brokers/registration/CBDU370419.html",
  "dataRetrievedAt": "2026-08-11T22:17:39.769Z",
  "notFound": false
}

A lower-tier holder looks almost the same, except expiryDate and daysUntilExpiry come back null and indefiniteRegistration is true, because that registration never expires. A number that is not on the register at all comes back as a clean, structured notFound: true record with a plain-English reason, never a crash or a generic error.

Monitor mode: the part that pays for itself

A one-off check tells you a carrier is licensed today. It tells you nothing about next month. Monitor mode fixes that:

1. Set monitorMode: true and give it registrationNumbers (an exact registration number is a stable ID to track, a company name is not, so name search is not trackable over time).
2. The first run establishes a baseline for each number, and still flags anything already worth knowing on day one (already expired, already close to expiry, already missing from the register).
3. Every run after that compares fresh data against what it saw last time and returns only what changed, plus a plain-English summary. No change still returns a cheap confirmation, so you know the check actually ran.
4. Schedule the Actor in Apify (Actor page → Schedules → Add schedule, e.g. daily or weekly) with the same input every time. That is the entire setup, no separate cron infrastructure needed.

Changes it watches for: status moving away from active, expiry crossing your warning threshold (default 90 days) or urgent threshold (default 30 days) in either direction, the registered role changing (e.g. a carrier authorisation being dropped), the registered address changing (a real fraud signal worth a second look), and a registration disappearing from the register entirely, see the FAQ below for exactly what that last one does and does not tell you.

Use cases

A construction firm vetting a new skip hire company. Before the contract is signed, one lookup confirms the registration number on the quote is real, active, and upper tier, not just a number printed on a van.

A facilities manager running weekly checks on 50 contractors. Put all 50 registration numbers into registrationNumbers with monitorMode: true and a weekly schedule. Most weeks, every result is a cheap no-change confirmation. The week one contractor's licence lapses, that is the one result that costs more, because it is the one result that matters.

An AI agent triggering an alert when a contractor's licence is about to expire. Point an agent at this Actor with a watchlist and an expiryWarningDays threshold. It gets back structured JSON it can act on directly, no HTML to parse, no manual register check to remember.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When it fires
Single or name-search lookup	$0.01 / record	registrationNumber or companyName, not using Monitor mode
Bulk lookup	$0.008 / record	registrationNumbers array, not using Monitor mode
Monitor mode, change detected	$0.05 / event	Something worth knowing changed since last run
Monitor mode, no change	$0.002 / event	Confirms the check ran and nothing changed

Realistic cost example: watching 50 contractors weekly in Monitor mode, where 2 or 3 typically have something change in a given week, costs roughly $0.10 to $0.15 (2-3 change events) plus $0.09 to $0.10 (47-48 no-change confirmations) per run, call it under $0.25/week, under $13/year, for 50 contractors checked every single week. A one-off single lookup costs a cent.

FAQ

Does this catch a revoked or suspended licence? Honestly: the Environment Agency's register does not publish a separate "revoked" or "suspended" status field, only a registration date and (for upper tier) an expiry date, confirmed by reading the register's own API specification before building this, not assumed. What it does do reliably: if a registration is removed from the register for any reason, including revocation, this Actor's lookup for that number starts returning not_found_on_register, and in Monitor mode that transition is flagged as a change event immediately. You get the fact that it disappeared, which is the actionable part, the register itself just does not label the cause. If you need the specific reason, that requires contacting the Environment Agency directly.

Does this work for trade or commercial waste carriers, not just household names? Yes, that is the primary use case. Skip hire firms, house clearance companies, and demolition/construction contractors are almost always upper tier, and upper tier is exactly where the expiry-tracking in Monitor mode earns its keep, lower-tier registrations never expire so there is nothing to track there beyond the address and role fields.

Can I look someone up by their Companies House number alone? Not directly, the Environment Agency register has no Companies House filter. Supply companiesHouseNumber alongside a registrationNumber or companyName instead, and the Actor cross-checks it against the number the Environment Agency itself has on file for that holder, flagging a match or mismatch. Sole traders and partnerships have no company number and come back as "not applicable."

What happens if a registration number is wrong or was never valid? A clean, structured result: notFound: true with a plain-English reason. Never a crash, never a generic error, that distinction between "this carrier was never registered" and "the lookup failed" matters for compliance records.

If this Actor helped you catch a licence problem before it became your problem, a review on this page helps a lot and helps decide what to build next.

Source

Data comes from the Environment Agency's official public register at environment.data.gov.uk, used under the Environment Agency Conditional Licence, which explicitly permits commercial use "by including it in your own product or application." This Actor is not affiliated with the Environment Agency, always attribute the source when redistributing this data further.