Waste Management
When the collection truck doesn't show, everyone on the street notices.
Waste disposal and recycling companies are important entities under the law — running an operation built from vehicles, weighbridges, plant control systems, and record-keeping. When the IT goes down, the problem piles up in plain sight.
Does this apply to you?
Annex 2 · Sector 2
Sector: Waste management
Undertakings engaged in waste management within the meaning of Section 3(14) KrWG.
Entity of essential importance
at least 250 employees — or annual turnover above €50 million and an annual balance sheet total above €43 million
Applies to entity types under Annex 1 · Section 28(1), (2) BSIG
Important entity
at least 50 employees — or annual turnover and balance sheet total above €10 million
Applies to entity types under Annexes 1 and 2 · Section 28(1), (2) BSIG
Important for you: Exempted are undertakings for which waste management is not their principal economic activity — so an industrial company's on-site recycling yard doesn't automatically turn the whole company into an entity in this sector.
Covered regardless of size: operators of critical facilities, qualified trust service providers, top-level domain registries, and DNS service providers (Section 28(1) Nos. 1, 2 BSIG); trust service providers always count as an important entity (Section 28(2) No. 1 BSIG). Employee count and financial figures are alternative thresholds (either one triggers coverage); for the financial figures, both values must be exceeded. Whether your specific company is covered is a case-by-case question — that's what lawyers are for.
What's typically in the register in this sector
These obligations decide it for you.
Section 30(2) No. 1 BSIG
Know your risks before the round stops
Risk analysis and IT security concepts — including the question of what happens when the weighbridge or route planning goes down for a day.
Section 30(2) No. 2 BSIG
Handle incidents in a structured way
Detect, respond, review: in municipal structures, a practiced procedure decides the outcome — not the on-call phone of a single person.
Section 30(2) No. 4 BSIG
Service providers and plant engineers
The security-relevant aspects of your relationships with providers and service companies — remote maintenance access to sorting and weighbridge systems belongs explicitly on that list.
Example (fictional): The waste operator without a working scale
At a municipal waste disposal operation, the weighbridge software goes down — encrypted. Intake and billing run on paper for two days, after which the data basis for an entire quarter's fee assessments is missing.
Recovery succeeds because a backup exists. What's missing is documentation of when the incident was first noticed — and that's exactly what the supervisory authority asks about first. Keep the moment of discovery cleanly recorded, and you won't be arguing about it later.
A freely invented example for illustration — no real customer, no legal advice
Here's how Compliverse takes this off your plate.
- 1
Log an incident and the countdown starts — anchored to a documented moment of discovery.
- 2
Plant, weighbridges, and remote-maintenance access become assets with criticality and an owner.
- 3
A ready-made backup and operations policy, adapted to your operation and signed off.
NIS2 in Waste Management: frequently asked questions
Is my Waste Management company in scope for NIS2?
Your sector is covered by Germany's BSI Act: Annex 2 · Sector 2, sector Waste management. That does not put you in scope automatically — a size threshold has to be met as well (Section 28(1), (2) BSIG). And no official notice arrives: you assess the classification yourself and register if it applies (Section 33 BSIG). Your sector also has an exception — it is set out on this page under “Are you in scope?”. Judging your individual case is a lawyer's job.
From what size does NIS2 apply to us?
You count as an essential entity from at least 250 employees — or annual turnover above €50 million and an annual balance sheet total above €43 million; as an important entity from at least 50 employees — or annual turnover and balance sheet total above €10 million (Section 28(1), (2) BSIG). Headcount and financial figures are alternatives to each other — but where the financial figures are used, both have to be exceeded. Some entity types are in scope regardless of size, among them operators of critical facilities and qualified trust service providers.
Which authority is responsible for us in Germany?
Registration and supervision sit with the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) — Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (Section 33 BSIG). Security incidents, however, do not go there: they go to the joint reporting office of the BSI and the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) — early warning within 24 hours, report within 72 hours, follow-up report a month later (Section 32 BSIG). This is the most common misreading of the act — the supervisory authority and the reporting office are not the same body.
What happens if we do not implement NIS2?
The obligations do not go away: registration stays due (Section 33 BSIG), so do the risk-management measures (Section 30(2) BSIG), and reporting deadlines start running with the first significant incident (Section 32 BSIG). On top of that, Section 38 BSIG puts management personally on the hook: they have to approve the measures, oversee their implementation, and undergo training themselves. “I didn't know” does not carry here.
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What becomes important next
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Legal status checked on 01/09/2026 · Every statement with a source · No legal advice