Data That Actually Does Something

By Tom Passmore, CIO and Co-Founder, Dsposal

What changes when you stop talking about data and start using it?

At Dsposal, we've spent the past decade working at the intersection of waste management and data. One thing is clear: the value of data isn't in having it. It's in what you do with it.

Data Is Good at Answering Certain Questions

Data excels at answering the fundamental questions: who, what, where, when, and how. It can also help you begin to answer some why questions. But perhaps more importantly, it’s exceptionally good at prompting the right why questions for humans to investigate. That distinction is important. Data can’t replace human expertise and judgement; but it surfaces what matters and sharpens focus.

Most people, when they think about data, think about Excel. It’s a powerful tool (one I use every day) but it’s just one tool, and it has a significant limitation: it doesn’t show relationships between different aspects of data well. Other tooling exists precisely to do that, but are often under-used in waste.

Seeing the Complexity of Waste

The Network View: Waste Data Flow

Waste Data Flow captures the who, what, where, when and how of municipal waste from local authorities. When you visualise it as a netwo

rk graph (nodes (dots) representing facilities, edges (lines) representing waste movements) the result is striking. At a national scale, showing every facility and every waste movement across England, it looks like a photograph taken from the Hubble telescope: beautiful, intricate and almost impossible to interpret.

Full national network graph of waste movements, Waste Data Flow Q100

Zoom in to a specific local authority, however, and the picture becomes more meaningful. A single local authority may interact with dozens of facilities, each of which branches out to many more. The thickness of each line reflects the volume of waste moving along that route. Suddenly you’re asking real questions: why do these chains exist? Where do they go? What is happening at each stage? Waste Data Flow doesn’t always provide those answers, but it surfaces the questions.

Zoomed network graph for a single local authority, with the origin node highlighted in red

Putting It on a Map

Taking those same facility relationships and plotting them geographically adds another layer of understanding. You can see waste originating from a single local authority and travelling across the country: up to Scotland, across to Wales, down to Kent. The geographic spread of even a single authority’s waste stream illustrates just how complex and distributed the system is.

Geographic map of waste movements from a single local authority across the UK

One deliberate provocation in this view: some facilities appear to sit out at sea. These represent sites where the address was unknown, placed offshore intentionally to make a point. These facilities do exist. So why don’t we know where they are?

Drilling Deeper: Waste Data Interrogator

Where Waste Data Flow covers municipal waste from local authorities, the Waste Data Interrogator covers waste facilities more broadly, including industrial, commercial and construction waste. It lets you examine the specific waste codes arriving at and leaving a facility, as well as what happened to them.

A Sankey Diagram Raises a Question

Looking at one facility, we can see approximately 145,000 tonnes of waste arriving, predominantly under code 19 12 12, with the stated fate being energy from waste. What comes out the other side, however, includes code 19 12 10 (refuse-derived fuel) and a further 34,000 tonnes of 19 12 12.

Sankey diagram showing waste received and removed at a specific facility

That’s interesting. If the fate was energy from waste, why is refuse-derived fuel appearing as a significant output? My interpretation: this wasn’t energy from waste at this stage. This was a bulking and storage operation, preparing material for energy recovery at the next step. The coding doesn’t reflect that accurately. It’s a good example of how data can raise the question even when it can’t definitively answer it.

Code 19 12 12: A Closer Look

Code 19 12 12 refers to waste generated by waste management facilities that is classified as other waste, including mixtures for mechanical treatment. In plain terms, it covers material that’s difficult to classify that has gone through some waste management processing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this code; the complexity of waste means that catch-all categories have to exist.

What’s interesting is the trends when you track 19 12 12 over time.

EWC Code (19 12 12) weight per year, 2019–2024, Waste Data Interrogator

Between 2019 and 2021, volumes arriving at waste sites under this code were roughly stable at around 16 million tonnes per year. After 2021, they began to decline, reaching their lowest point in the most recent published data from 2024 (down to 12.7 million tonnes). This is broadly positive: it likely reflects a combination of improved processing capability and better classification practice. The sector appears to be getting better at knowing what it’s dealing with.

A Regional Anomaly Worth Investigating

EWC Code (19 12 12) by region, 2021 vs 2024, Waste Data Interrogator

Breaking the data down by region reveals something more specific. In 2021, Yorkshire and the Humber generated the most 19 12 12 waste at over 3.1 million tonnes. By 2024, that figure had dropped to around 1.75 million tonnes, a significant fall and a shift from first to third in the regional rankings. The South East, by contrast, moved from approximately 1.9 million tonnes to just under 2 million tonnes: a small increase, but one that ran counter to the national trend.

More striking is this: in 2021, there were no records of 19 12 12 waste with a “not-codeable” region of origin. By 2024, over 260,000 tonnes was reported as “not-codeable”. Meaning that they’d come from an unknown origin. Every facility generating this waste operates under a permit or exemption registered with the Environment Agency or another regulator, meaning every facility has a physical location. So why isn’t that location being passed on?

That question becomes more urgent in the context of rising waste crime. We are seeing increasing volumes of processed waste being found at illegal dump sites, and processed waste could carry a code like 19 12 12. As overall volumes of this waste decline, the share with a not codeable origin is growing. Is that connected to the movement of illegally managed waste through the system? We don’t have a definitive answer. But it’s a question worth asking seriously.

From Questions to Action

The UK’s most dangerous illegal waste dump, in Wigan on land partially owned by the Crown, is a stark illustration of what happens when waste crime goes unchecked. Getting away from situations like this requires genuine understanding of the complexity of the waste system, not just holding data about it.

That’s what Dsposal builds. Our compliance tools, including our Compliance Dashboard, use Waste Data Flow and Waste Data Interrogator in combination to surface exactly these kinds of questions and provide the information that operators, regulators and local authorities need to act on them.

Data that actually does something starts with asking better questions. We’re here to help you ask them and maybe together we can find some answers too.

Want to know more? Visit dsposal.uk or get in touch directly.