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Tyres, scrap metal, end of life vehicles: three streams, one tracking duty

Most yards we visit are not one business. A breaker takes cars in, pulls the tyres off, and sends the shells and the loose metal over the weighbridge. A metal merchant takes trade and public scrap, and gets offered a car most weeks. A tyre operation collects casings from the same garages the breaker sells parts to. From 1 October 2026 the same duty lands on all three, and each stream files a different record.

The duty follows your permit, not your material

Defra’s scope guidance does not list trades. It says that if you are licensed or permitted to receive controlled waste, you must enter details of every load you receive, and that this applies to all permitted operations, installations and mobile plants. Nothing in that sentence cares whether the load was a Corsa, a cage of casings or eight tonnes of mixed metal. The duty is triggered by receipt, under regulation 4 of the Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026, and the deadline is the same for every stream.

Defra works the timing example itself: waste received at 9am on Monday must be submitted, and a unique reference number received back, by 11:59pm on Wednesday. The day the load arrives does not count. Read the detail in the two working day rule.

Three streams, three records

What changes between streams is the code on the record, the quantity your trade actually measures, and the second body of law sitting behind the load.

The overlaps are where a single stream system starts to hurt. Tyres pulled off a car inside an authorised treatment facility are 16 01 03, the same code as a tyre recycler’s incoming load. Loose ferrous from a dismantled shell is metal, and the code depends on where it came from. A yard doing two of these needs one record that can say all of it, and the full code list for a scrap car shows how many codes one vehicle can turn into.

The unit problem nobody mentions in the sales demo

Defra’s record wants a weight. Two of these three trades do not think in weights at the moment the load lands.

Tyre collectors count. A driver drops eighty casings and the paperwork says eighty casings, and nobody puts a cage on a weighbridge at the kerb. Breakers count in vehicles. Only the metal trade thinks in the same unit the record wants, because the weighbridge is right there. So a system that only takes kilograms forces two trades out of three to invent a number at the gate, and an invented number that later turns out wrong is an error you are then required to correct within one month of noticing, under regulation 7.

The honest answer is to record what the gate knows, mark it as an estimate, and let the weighbridge correct it later as a new record rather than a quiet edit. That is how our tyre gate works: count the tyres, take the estimate, and when the load is weighed the correction goes to Defra by itself. The receipt itself never changes, because a compliance record you can silently rewrite is not evidence.

Your exemption may put you outside all of this

Worth checking before you buy anything. The scope guidance names permitted operations, installations and mobile plants. It does not name registered exemptions, read on 27 August 2026. A small operation running on a T8 or T9 exemption is registered, not permitted. That is a reprieve with a date on it: phase 2 brings exempt sites in during October 2027.

Those exemptions are smaller than most people remember. T8 lets you store or treat 60 tonnes of truck tyres or 40 tonnes of other tyres over any 7 day period, in piles no bigger than 10 tonnes with a fire break between them. T9 lets you hold up to 1,000 tonnes of metal at any one time, 50 tonnes of it cable, stacked no higher than 5 metres. Go past those and the Environment Agency tells you to apply for a permit, and a permit puts you inside the digital tracking duty.

T9 carries one line that catches scrap merchants out every year. Under that exemption you cannot receive, store or treat any end of life vehicles or components of end of life vehicles, and the guidance names engine blocks, batteries and catalytic converters as examples. If cars come onto your site you need an authorised treatment facility permit, and with it the tracking your permit already asks for.

What the confirmed provider list offers each trade

Only software on Defra’s confirmed list can file your receipts. We row-counted the list from its own page on 27 August 2026: 63 providers, the page last updated 18 August 2026. We published a comparison of all 63.

The metal trade is represented on it. Increase Computers, BrandBuilt and Metal Track were all listed on the day we checked, and scrap systems speak weighbridge natively because that is the industry they grew up in. The tyre trade is not represented by name: no provider or product on the list is named for tyres, casings or retreading. That is a fact about names on a list, not a judgement about what any product can do, and a general purpose load logger will take a tyre load like any other. It does tell you how much of the tyre industry’s own vocabulary you should expect to find inside one.

For vehicles the gap is wider than vocabulary. No system on the list markets the ELV workflow: the Certificate of Destruction and DVLA notification, depollution moving the shell from hazardous to non hazardous on the record, and the hazardous coding an un-depolluted car has to carry in the receipt itself.

What we built, and why it is three products

One engine, three front doors. The Defra connection, the offline queue, the audit trail and the evidence pack are the same code underneath. What changes is the gate screen, because the thirty seconds at the gate are the only part of this a yard actually experiences.

• Vehicles. Type the reg. The record fills itself from DVLA, the carrier is checked against the Environment Agency register during book in, and one tap files the receipt as 16 01 04*. CoD, depollution and the evidence pack live on the same vehicle record. This is BreakerHQ.
• Tyres. Count, container type, carrier, done. Weight can be an estimate at the gate and a weighbridge correction later. This is TyreHQ, at tyre-hq.co.uk, and it costs the same £39 a month.
• Scrap metal. Pick the material, take the weighbridge figure, record that you saw the seller’s ID, file it. The material picks the code for you. Scrap sites run inside BreakerHQ today: an owner adds a site from the switcher and chooses scrap metal.

One login holds all three. Each site keeps its own separate records, its own Defra registration and its own plan, which is what a permit per site means in practice. Compliance is £39 a month per site, every user included, and set up before October and you pay nothing until the law starts.

If your yard only ever takes one of these three, buy the thing built for that one. If it takes two, ask the question that decides it: when the second stream rolls through the gate, does the system have somewhere honest to put it, or does someone end up typing it into the wrong shape?

Get set up before October