DIWASS is live: what the new EU Waste Shipment Regulation means for scrap yards

If your yard sells material across a border — and in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, most yards do — the rules that govern that movement were rewritten last year, and the biggest change took effect on 21 May 2026.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1157 replaced the 2006 waste shipment regime. It is the largest overhaul of EU waste shipment law in nearly two decades, and it lands squarely on metal recyclers, because metal scrap is one of the most heavily shipped waste streams in Europe.

This is a plain-language summary of what changed and what it means operationally. It is not legal advice — your national competent authority is the authority on how the regulation applies to your permits.

The headline change: paper is finished

The single most disruptive provision is procedural rather than environmental. From 21 May 2026, waste shipment procedures must be carried out electronically, through the Digital Waste Shipment System (DIWASS) and the national systems that connect to it.

For years the practical reality of a green-listed metal shipment was an Annex VII document travelling with the load — printed, signed, filed in a folder, and produced on request during an inspection. That model is being retired. The information still has to exist, but it has to exist as structured data submitted through a system, not as a sheet of paper in a cab.

Malta's Environment and Resources Authority has published guidance for operators on the transition to DIWASS; if you hold an ERA waste permit, that announcement is your starting point. Other member states are running equivalent national onboarding.

What that means for a yard

Before	From 21 May 2026
Annex VII printed and signed per shipment	Shipment data submitted electronically
Records kept as scans or folders	Records must be retrievable as data, per shipment
Errors found at inspection	Errors found at submission — before the load moves

The practical consequence is that your source records have to be clean before the shipment, not tidied up afterwards. A digital submission will reject a load whose material description, weight, or origin does not add up. If your purchase records live on paper tickets or in a spreadsheet that one person reconciles at the end of the week, that reconciliation now sits on the critical path of getting a container out of the yard.

The second change: exports get harder in 2027

The regulation also tightens what may leave the EU.

From 21 May 2027, exports of waste to non-OECD countries are permitted only where the destination country has told the Commission it is willing to receive that waste and has demonstrated it can manage it in an environmentally sound manner. Separately, EU exporters must ensure that facilities receiving their waste have been subject to an independent audit confirming environmentally sound management.

For yards that have historically moved lower-grade material to non-OECD destinations, this is a commercial question, not just a compliance one. It is worth modelling now which of your outbound grades depend on destinations that may not appear on the Commission's list, and what those grades are worth if they have to be sold inside the OECD instead.

What to do in the next quarter

1. Confirm your registration. Make sure your entity is registered with your national competent authority for electronic waste shipment procedures, and that a named person owns it. This is the step most often left half-finished.
2. Audit your material descriptions. Every grade you ship should map to a specific waste code you can defend. Free-text descriptions that varied by whoever wrote the ticket will not survive a structured submission.
3. Get weights to a single source of truth. Weighbridge, purchase record, and shipment declaration should reconcile without manual intervention.
4. Check your record retention. You need to be able to produce the record for a given shipment quickly, on request, for the retention period your permit specifies.
5. Map your outbound destinations against the 2027 rules. Start the conversation with buyers in affected countries about audit evidence now, not in 2027.

The underlying point

Every one of these obligations resolves to the same thing: can you produce accurate, structured, per-transaction records on demand?

That is a data problem before it is a legal problem. A yard that records purchases as they happen — material, weight, price, seller, date, in one system — answers a regulator's question in minutes. A yard that keeps tickets in a drawer answers it in days, and sometimes cannot answer it at all.

If you are still reconciling purchases in a spreadsheet, the digital shipment regime is a good forcing function to fix that. See how SPiS handles purchase records and reporting.

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Sources and further reading

• Regulation (EU) 2024/1157 — full text on EUR-Lex
• European Parliament legislative summary
• Malta ERA — New EU Waste Shipment Regulation and DIWASS