Devon County Councilā€™s new Bideford Recycling Centre achieves 65% recycling rate

14 Jan 2011

Bideford Recycling Centre was opened in May 2007 after being built with over 7,000 tonnes of recycled road planings and 350 reclaimed bricks. Operated by Viridor Waste Management on behalf of Devon County Council, the site achieved a 65% recycling rate for 2007/8 handling 4,300 tonnes of waste in all and uses a split-level design to keep the majority of plant and HGV movements in a dedicated area away from the general public users of the facilities on offer. As well as an educational information board, the site also offers a dedicated, fenced reuse sales area, complete with a dedicated storage area, which has proved particularly popular with visitors.

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Southamptonā€™s Household Waste Recycling Centre reaps the benefits of improvement

14 Jan 2011

The Rubbish Revived Household Waste Recycling Centre, which is operated by Veolia Environmental Services on behalf of Southampton City Council, has benefited from a range of improvements as part of the council’s drive to increase recycling rates and provide an enhanced service to residents. After customer surveys identified areas for improvement, site changes were completed including a new layout, new signage, a ‘Charity Corner’ and improved accessibility, while residents chose a ‘Recycling at Rubbish Revived’ re-brand for the site, which reopened in May 2008.

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2010 Gate Fees Report

03 Jan 2011

This WRAP report aims to raise price transparency and, through improving the flow of information, enhance the efficiency with which the waste management market operates.  A lack of market information may reduce a local authority's ability to make informed decisions on waste management options in terms of both economic and environmental costs.

Cutting waste: cutting costs and improving waste and recycling services

03 Jan 2011

A new report by Eunomia on behalf of the Conservative Environmental Network gives recommendations on how the sector can save money and suggests how £770 million/annum could be saved.

Analysis of kerbside dry recycling performance in the UK 2008/2009

02 Jan 2011

This report provides an analysis of kerbside dry recycling performance for local authorities in the United Kingdom for 2008/09. It explores how the nature of the collection systems and local area characteristics influence recycling performance, and provides benchmarks against which authorities can compare themselves.

Efficient working ā€“ Daventry District Council moves to four day week waste collections and saves Ā£250k/annum! and tips on how to move to a four day week

02 Dec 2010

Four day working has become a real option for waste collection authorities in a bid to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Since November 2009, kerbside waste and recycling collections in Daventry District have been taking place over four days a week to make the service more costā€effective to the taxpayer. Although crews continue to work a 37ā€hour week, collections no longer take place on Mondays, including bank holidays, which has reduced costs by approximately £250,000 and freed up additional time for scheduled vehicle maintenance. This case study explains the range of benefits it has produced, along with some of the challenges faced.

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This document has been compiled to provide a brief overview of the ideas around moving waste and/or recycling collections from the standard Monday to Friday week to a four day week system. A number of authorities have made such changes to their services in recent years and this document brings together guidance and advice for councils who may be considering or actively looking at this way of working.

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Collection contracts variations & mid-term improvement opportunities

09 Nov 2010

This document provides support & information for councils who are considering changes & improvements to their waste, recycling and associated services during the lifetime of an existing collection contract. WIN (the Waste Improvement Network) has spoken to a number of councils who have recently undergone similar processes and has brought together some of the information required to embark on such a project. WIN presents the circumstances in which collection contracts may need to be reā€visited, varied, reā€negotiated or in some cases reā€tendered. WIN also explores the associated issues including Public Contracts Regulations; when to reā€tender; legal lessons and examples of waste procurement damages. Also includes sections on where to go for support; effective contract management and procurement Training.

National infrastructure plan 2010

09 Nov 2010

National infrastructure plan 2010 - read the Governments plans for the future of Britain's economic infrastructure. Items regarding waste include: low carbon economy, waste reduction, improving waste treatment, landfill diversion, EfW as well as encouraging authorities to incentivise households to recycle more

WIN's Waste Services Benchmark - A free service for councils in England

27 Oct 2010

Want to find out how your service compares? This new service is designed to help your council identify areas for improvement by comparing against a Waste Services Benchmark which reflects the range of practice across the country

The service is designed to be easy to use, engaging and flexible. Councils which helped test the service said "It's a really thought provoking service that has given me clear guidance for areas to develop." It also provides advice and support on developing an improvement plan. It is intended to be challenging - so even councils which are performing well can benefit.

Accessing your council's account. WIN have created a FREE on-line account for every council and waste partnership in England. For lots more information, see their Frequently Asked Questions page or contact win@southeastiep.gov.uk to obtain login details.

Keeping MRF Contamination in check WIN case study

14 Oct 2010

NEW!! Keeping MRF Contamination in check - Find out how Project Integra audit the contamination at the Materials Recovery Facility in Alton

Less in the bin, more in your pocket!

08 Oct 2010

Less in the bin, more in your pocket: Wandsworth Council asks residents to throw less in the bin and saves £300 000 / year on disposal costs!

In summer 2009, Wandsworth Council launched a new, high profile and innovative waste awareness campaign which urged residents to consider the connection between the amount of waste they threw into their bin and the levels of Council tax they paid.

Two key campaign messages were used:-

“Less in the bin, more in your pocket”

“1kg less waste per household per week saves £500,000 a year”

Residents were promised that if they reduced the amount of rubbish they produced by one kilo per week the Council would save half a million pounds a year in disposal costs. Up to April 2010, figures showed that the Wandsworth householders had gone a long way to achieving this target. The residual waste collected had fallen by almost 3 million kilos! This case study examines how a simple campaign message and a back-to-basics ‘waste hierarchy’ approach can help to achieve significant disposal cost savings for an authority.

Street Cleaning and Recycling 'A Greener Picture' a Capital Ambition case study

08 Oct 2010

Street cleaning is one of local government's most visible services. But increasingly, local authorities are trying to secure value for money within these services as financial and budgetary pressures mount.

To help boroughs improve their street cleaning services, Capital Ambition and London's Environment Directors' Network (LEDNET) commissioned Tribal to undertake a review of these areas, to help local authorities understand how best to deploy their resources and improve efficiency and performance.

Collecting the data
By collecting quantitative data from 10 participating local authorities, Tribal set out to build up a picture of what a good value for money street cleaning service would look like.

"We collected a wide range of data from the 10 councils looking at, for example, how much they spent [on street cleaning], what they spent the money on, how many staff they employed and how they operated their services," explains Olivia Crill, Tribal's assistant director for local government.

The results showed that within London there is huge variance in expenditure on street cleaning - one borough's annual spend totalled less than £3 million whereas another's reached more than £17 million in 2007/08.

Performance also varied: Tribal found that the proportion of streets with unacceptable levels of litter and detritus ranged from two to 40 per cent.

To help get beneath these figures and understand why cost and performance vary so much, Tribal developed an 'ease-to-serve index' to help demonstrate the impact of different environments in which street cleaning services operate.

Those councils with a major night-time economy would, for example, inevitably face greater challenges in keeping their streets clean than those with predominantly residential neighbourhoods.

"We wanted to take into account the different factors that make it harder to keep streets clean, such as population density or deprivation" explains Ms Crill. "The challenges you face in Bromley, for example, are very different from those faced by Westminster."

Tribal has now drawn up a set of three blueprints illustrating what a value for money service would look like for 'easy', 'medium' and 'hard-to-serve' authorities. These blueprints look at the fleet, staff, expenditure characteristics as well as the activities needed for a value for money service.

These are being used by the participating councils as a resource to help them benchmark their performance and Tribal is now working with LEDNET to broaden the evidence base supporting the resource, by gathering data from 25 London boroughs.

As well as the street cleaning review, Tribal was also commissioned to identify ways in which councils could improve their recycling rates. The organisation held interviews with recycling officers and heads of service at eight participating authorities to find out how they run their recycling services and work out which factors helped boost recycling rates.

Some of the results challenged initial expectations. Tribal found, for example, that having a high proportion of flats doesn't necessarily translate into lower recycling rates, despite the difficulties associated with collecting recycling in blocks of flats.

Next steps
Tribal has produced a set of recommendations but warns that there is no silver bullet when it comes to raising recycling rates. The best step forward is to deploy a range of activities, such as well-serviced bring banks, co-mingled collections and community engagement to maximise recycling rates.

If you would like some further information about this project or access to the blueprint work please contact Rebecca Parker.

LGA highlights cost savings from optimising routes

26 Sep 2010

Councils could potentially save hundreds of thousands of pounds by using technology such as mobile, web-mapping and satellite tracking to increase the efficiency of their waste and recycling collection rounds, according to a report published by the Local Government Association (LGA).

The study, entitled ‘The Value of Geospatial Information to Local Public Service Delivery in England and Wales', identifies waste collections as one of the key areas where using the technology had helped councils save £230 million in 2009.

In particular, it cited the experiences of Daventry district council, in Northamptonshire, where using location-based technology to plan waste collection routes resulted in £223,000 in savings from reduced mileage, less overtime, smaller vehicles and fewer rounds.

Councillor David Parsons, chairman of the LGA's improvement board, said: "Whether it's bin men working smarter, fewer phone calls to inquiry centres, freeing up staff from time-consuming checks or reducing parking ticket machine maintenance costs, making the most of modern technology and data sharing has seen huge cash savings across the country.

"This is money which can be ploughed into vital frontline services on which millions of people rely each year, and is yet another example of councils striving to be more efficient to make their stretched budgets go as far as possible."

Councillor Parsons also said the report, which was produced for the LGA by consultants ConsultingWhere and ACIL Tasman, concluded that using this kind of technology and information sharing could potentially save councils up to £372 million by 2014/14.

"In this climate of strained budgets, councils must strive to keep reaching more residents and improving services ever more creatively, and look at more ways of working together to make these big savings," he added.

Daventry

The report outlines how Daventry district council used geospatial technology to optimise household waste collection routes under a project which began in October 2006, aimed at generally improving the efficiency of waste management within Northamptonshire as a whole.

It explains that, after recording existing routes to act as baseline data, the council then matched these against "new electronic routes" which were then optimised electronically using RouteSmart software, which also developed several different collection scenarios.

"Daventry chose the one that best supported local need, while at the same time generating savings," it adds, explaining that, initial cash savings included: £25,000 per annum from a 12-13% reduction in mileage; £17,000 per annum from spare capacity allowing for vehicle washing; £28,000 per annum from employee overtime being "virtually eliminated"; and, £25,000 saved from reducing the planned purchase of a six-wheeled collection vehicle to four-wheeled alternative.

Related links

• ‘The Value of Geospatial Information to Local Public Service Delivery in England and Wales' report  

The report also explained that the council had, since the initial changes, identified further savings using route optimisation to implement a four-day working week for collections, with the service being delivered using 16 rather than 18 rounds.

"This will yield substantial savings in manpower costs and avoid the need to purchase additional vehicles. Implementation of the plan will generate cash savings of £153,000 per annum," it added.

Please click here to read more

Local Environmental Quality - Case Studies

26 Sep 2010

Following a request from the East Midlands Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (EM IEP), Keep Britain Tidy submitted a proposal to develop a regional programme to tackle the poor levels of local environmental quality in the East Midlands, as assessed independently by Keep Britain Tidy for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The most recent published results from the national Local Environmental Quality Survey of England (LEQSE) 2008/09 show that the East Midlands was second from the bottom of the English regions league table with an unsatisfactory LEQSE score of 62%.

The two identifiable work streams proposed as part of the regional improvement programme were the efficiency work stream and the improvement work stream. Both elements of work were intended to benefit the whole region, as well as carrying out discrete work with a small development group of authorities in the East Midlands to look at best practice. Key findings, challenges and potential improvements from the work steams were to be fed into the East Midlands Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (EM IEP) and the ‘Efficiency Challenge Project’. The East Midlands Improvement and Efficiency Partnership would then work with local authorities on the recommendations and the measurement of potential savings and improvements made within this and previous reports.

Somerset Virtual Unitary Authority for the Collection of Waste

23 Aug 2010

Facing increasing costs, challenges and customer expectations, all six councils in Somerset joined forces to create a "virtual unitary authority" for the collection of waste and awarded a single county-wide contract. These changes are expected to achieve £1.5 million revenue equivalent savings a year.

Click HERE to read the case study.

National Waste Partnerships Mapping and Support Strategy Project

13 Jul 2010

Local authorities working in partnership are a significant element in the successful delivery of the Government’s waste strategy objectives to reduce municipal waste disposal to landfill and to prevent waste and increase re-use, recycling and composting.

This project was commissioned by DEFRA and Improvement and Efficiency South East (IESE) and required Beasley Associates Ltd to: map out the extent and range of partnership working within local authorities in England; conduct a ‘health check’ on the state of municipal waste partnerships; and, identify areas where further support from DEFRA and its support agencies could assist in developing partnership working and accelerate the ability for local authority waste services to identify and implement efficiency savings through better collaboration.

Of 51 active local authority waste partnerships identified in England, current information was gained from 47 in a series of structured interviews and an analysis of activities. A number of other interviews were carried out with partnerships no longer active and also with representatives from RIEPs to provide additional context.

Benchmarking and Comparing Costs in Waste and Recycling

08 Jul 2010

1. Benchmarking and comparing costs in waste and recycling: why is
it so complex?
2. What is the primary reason for your council wanting to compare
costs?
3. Efficiency reviews - is benchmarking necessary?
4. Differing collection policies - the main factor explaining cost
variation
5. Basic benchmarking / basic costs or component costs
comparisons: useful pointers
6. Comparing costs in more detail
7. General advice

More for Less, Guidance for Local Authorities on Saving Money in Waste and Recycling Services

08 Jul 2010

We know the pressure is on you to save money. This guidance covers some of the main things that councils can do (and some have done) to save money while either maintaining or improving services. This can help all councils whether their service is in-house or contracted-out.

This docuement is relevant to:

• Collection / WCAs?
• Disposal / WDAs?
• In-house services/DSOs?
• Contracted-out services?