R3: Recycling organic substances
Organic material that isn't a solvent is recycled or reclaimed. Composting is the familiar case, and the code also covers preparing items for re-use, backfilling with organic material, and gasification or pyrolysis where the products are used as chemicals.
The legal wording
Recycling/reclamation of organic substances which are not used as solvents (including composting and other biological transformation processes)
The annex adds, in a footnote: This includes preparing for re-use, gasification and pyrolysis using the components as chemicals and recovery of organic materials in the form of backfilling.
From Annex II to the Waste Framework Directive, which the Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 point to for every R code.
Recovery in the waste hierarchy
R3 is a recovery operation. The waste hierarchy ranks recovery above disposal, and a business that passes waste on has to take the reasonable steps open to it to follow that order.
On a Digital Waste Tracking receipt
For each EWC code (the six-digit code from the List of Wastes that says what a waste is) on a receipt, the site that takes the waste in records the D code or the R code, or both, for what it will do with it, and the weight each code covers.
Sources
- Annex I to the Waste Framework Directive: disposal operations
- Annex II to the Waste Framework Directive: recovery operations
- The Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026: Sch. 1, para. 14: the D or R code for each waste code on a receipt
- The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011, regulation 12: the waste hierarchy
- DEFRA: Digital Waste Tracking production approval tests: test R04, a receipt with no D or R code, accepted with a warning
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CarrierNote is on the GOV.UK software provider list, connected to DEFRA's Digital Waste Tracking service. Receiving sites are in scope from October 2026 and carriers from October 2027, and you can be recording to DEFRA's standard from your first load, whenever you start.