Turning environmental red tape into a portal businesses trust

A six-month discovery and design phase that untangled UK packaging and WEEE compliance, and won a £691k programme to build it.

Biffa is one of the UK's leading waste management and environmental services providers. Its customers, businesses across the country, are legally required to report complex data under Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) schemes, or risk fines and reputational damage. We were brought in to discover, design and deliver a new Compliance Portal that could turn that regulatory burden into something businesses could actually understand and complete with confidence.

Headquarters

Headquarters

Buckinghamshire, UK

Founded

Founded

1912

Industry

Industry

Waste Management and Environmental Services

Company size

Company size

10,000+

Untangling a genuinely complex regulatory problem

The businesses Biffa serves rarely operate as a single, simple entity. Most sit inside parent companies, subsidiaries and multiple physical sites, each with its own reporting obligations under one or more compliance schemes. Layer on different user roles, large volumes of administrative data and a real risk of reporting errors, and the challenge stopped being about forms and dashboards. It became about translating genuinely technical regulatory requirements into a workflow that non-specialists could complete without second-guessing themselves. Understanding how these organisations actually structure themselves, before designing a single screen, was where most of the early work went.

Designing registration and hierarchy from the ground up

We led the first-time registration journey from scratch, including Companies House integration, address management, SIC code selection, turnover information and compliance scheme enrolment. From there, the harder problem was hierarchy: supporting parent organisations, subsidiaries and sites, each with different reporting requirements, permissions and data aggregation needs, without forcing customers into a rigid structure that didn't match how their business actually worked. Rather than inventing a new mental model, we designed the system to reflect the organisational structures customers already had.

£691k

Implementation programme awarded off the back of discovery and design

3

Organisational levels supported end to end: parent, subsidiary and site

230%

Reduction in rejected submissions and reporting errors after launch

Building governance in, not bolting it on

Compliance data is rarely owned by one person. We designed role-based permissions, view and edit access models, and compliance service administration so that multiple teams within the same organisation could manage their obligations without stepping on each other or losing visibility of who had access to what. This mattered as much to Biffa's operational teams as it did to customers, since permission failures are exactly the kind of thing that turn into rejected submissions and support tickets.

Learning to remove, not just add

Requirements shifted constantly across the programme, new regulatory nuances, changing API structures, operational feedback, and we treated that as a design input rather than a distraction. The clearest example: we removed the ability for customers to add subsidiaries themselves, after watching users create records incorrectly and generate rejected submissions and extra admin work as a result. Cutting the feature simplified the workflow and reduced errors more effectively than any amount of extra guidance text would have.

Sometimes the best user experience is achieved by removing functionality rather than adding more.

“Detailed designs and flexibility when dealing with multiple stakeholders in ensuring their vision came to life.”

Christopher Blacklock

Business Director

The long view

The real output of this project was never the forms or the dashboards. It was confidence, businesses being able to understand exactly what was expected of them, complete essential tasks without fear of getting it wrong, and stay compliant with regulation that exists to protect the environment. Internally, the programme was described as some of the strongest B2B work delivered in recent years, and a clear example of digital transformation that genuinely improved an existing workflow rather than just re-skinning it. The platform launched in 2025, with Biffa's first group of compliance customers successfully onboarded during the soft launch.