More than 45,000 tonnes of waste recycled, £50,000 investment in a single site and just one per cent of waste sent to landfill.
These are amongst the successes of Staffordshire’s Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRC) since they were brought back in-house by the county council last year.
Other highlights for the service include improved customer satisfaction and additional investment in staff training, equipment and vehicles. The service also recovered energy from around 40,000 tonnes of waste that could not be recycled. This was taken to the state-of-the-art facility at Four Ashes, operated by Veolia, where it was processed and turned into electricity and transferred to the National Grid.
Further developments include declaring all 14 sites as anti-idling zones to reduce air pollution from vehicles in the local area.
Simon Tagg, Staffordshire County Council’s Cabinet member for Environment, Infrastructure and Climate Change said: “We’re extremely pleased with the success of our household waste recycling centres since we brought them back in-house last year.
“Taking over the management and day-to-day running of our sites means we can maintain the best service for residents, be sustainable and provide good value for money.
“The team have worked extremely hard to be able to provide the best service possible and I would like to thank them. I’d also like to thank our customers too for their efforts in recycling as much waste as we possibly can. Reducing the amount of waste that goes into landfill is key to a sustainable Staffordshire and our commitment to reduce the county’s carbon footprint to net zero by 2050.”
The county council has also committed to further improvements to the sites in the coming years and it’s work with partner Biffa, to improve the capacity and safety of the sites continues.
Paul Norton, Biffa’s General Manager for the West Midlands and Staffordshire area, said: “With over 100 years of expertise, we’re an established leader of sustainable waste management in the UK, providing unrivalled end-to-end waste and recycling solutions for thousands of businesses and millions of households each day.
“We’re delighted to have been working alongside Staffordshire County Council for the past year, managing the large and varied types of waste that residents dispose of at the county’s 14 busy household waste recycling centres.
“Our twelve drivers and seven trucks service the sites seven days a week, 363 days per year, taking the waste to the most suitable site to be recycled or transformed into energy. We very much look forward to building on this success story over the coming weeks, months and years.”
Staffordshire has 14 HWRC’s across the county, as well as a site over the county border at Baddesley Ensor, jointly funded with, and run by Warwickshire County Council. The Burntwood site also received a £50,000 investment last year to improve the site and its facilities.
Currently accepting around 85,000 tonnes of waste per annum across 42 types of material, the recycling centres are visited approximately 1.6 million times a year by residents and some 20,000 times by traders.
People can find their local recycling centre by visiting: www.staffordshire.gov.uk/recycling
