What is a waste sack?

A waste sack is a heavy-duty bag used instead of a wheelie bin for commercial waste, sold by licensed waste collectors like Capital Recycle, and by some councils for their trade waste rounds. Other names for the same product: waste bag, commercial waste sack or commercial waste bag, trade waste sack, business waste sack, refuse sack, pre-paid sack or pre-paid bag, printed or branded bag, pay-as-you-go sack, council trade sack. The service is called bag collection, sack collection or bin bag collection.

The key distinction from a bin liner, a black bag or any bag bought in a shop: the price of a commercial waste sack includes the collection and the disposal of whatever is in it. A bin liner is an empty bag and nothing more; nobody is coming for it. A pre-paid sack is a collection service sold by the bag. The sack is printed with the collector's name and the stream, general waste or dry mixed recycling, and the print is the proof of payment: the driver takes every sack with that print and leaves the rest, and an enforcement officer who finds printed sacks outside a business can see who is collecting them. Plain black bags put out by a business are treated as fly-tipping, because no registered carrier has agreed to take them and there is no waste transfer note behind them. The same goes for the free sacks that a sack-collection borough gives its residents: those are for household waste only, paid for through council tax, and a business that uses them is fly-tipping as well. Some boroughs write this into their rules: Wandsworth requires a trade sack to carry the collector's name, a contact number and the words Trade Waste or Commercial Waste, and bars black, green, yellow and orange as the base colour, so that a trade sack can never be mistaken for a household one.

It is also a different product from the builders' bags sold at B&Q and builders' merchants. A rubble sack is an empty bag for heavy debris; a tonne bag or bulk bag is a woven container for aggregates and rubble; a skip bag such as a Hippo bag is a one-off alternative to a skip, filled with building or garden waste and collected once by a crane lorry. None of them is a recurring collection for everyday business waste. A commercial waste sack is for the rubbish and recycling a shop, café or office produces every week.

How it works: sacks are sold by the roll, 25 or 50 to a roll (ours come in rolls of 25, two rolls to an order), with a separate print for general waste and for recycling. Full sacks go out on the agreed days, inside the time window the borough allows, and the collector's van takes them on its round, so nothing is left on the pavement. There is no bin to store, no bin rental and no charge for a quiet week. The collector issues a waste transfer note, usually annual, which covers the business's duty of care.

Who uses them: premises with no room for a wheelie bin, such as a shop with a small back room, an office in a shared building or a café with a narrow yard, and businesses whose volume is too small for a bin. Below about 10 sacks a week a sack service is the cheaper option; above that, a wheelie bin on a weekly lift costs less per litre. Ours hold about 140 litres, up to 5 kg each, come from our own stock and are delivered in London the same day.

Why the names get mixed up: "bag collection" and "sack collection" are used by three different trades. Waste collectors mean a pre-paid sack service like this one. Skip firms mean a skip bag or Hippo bag collected by crane. Builders' merchants and DIY stores sell empty rubble sacks and tonne bags with no collection at all. Search engines, and the adverts around them, often treat the three as one thing, so a search for commercial bag collection can return skip bags, and a search for waste bags can return bin liners. The test is simple: if the price of the bag includes someone coming to take it away and dispose of what is in it, it is a commercial waste sack.