Midlands councils unite to recycle road sweepings
9 January 2012
Seven Midlands councils have clubbed together to recycle road sweepings for the first time in a bid to save £10 million and boost their recycling rates.
Warwickshire county council has led on procurement of a contract to recycle road sweepings which is expected to save the authority around £400,000 a year over seven years - as well as boosting the county’s recycling rate by at least three per cent.
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- Inside the new SITA UK facility in Willenhall that will recycle road sweepings following its £750,000 investment.
In a pioneering move, the county council has signed up a host of other neighbouring authorities to the £9.3 million contract with SITA UK Ltd – including Coventry city council, Staffordshire county council, Solihull metropolitan borough council, Herefordshire council, Worcestershire county council and Leicestershire county council.
To service the deal, SITA has developed a state-of-the-art processing facility near Wolverhampton which will handle up to 30,500 tonnes a year from the seven authorities over the life of the contract, which officially commenced last week (January 3).
Cllr Alan Cockburn, Warwickshire county council’s portfolio holder for sustainable communities, said: “It is almost unheard of to have seven neighbouring councils signing up on the same contract and we are justifiably proud that we have achieved such a groundbreaking deal.
“This kind of joined-up working between local authorities will deliver a more efficient service across the Midlands region and ultimately save money from the public purse.
“The signing of this innovative contract means that we will be diverting road sweepings from landfill and avoiding escalating landfill tax which is set to hit £80 a tonne by 2014.”
Facility
SITA’s £750,000 facility near Wolverhampton, which opened in December 2011, is located on the site of a former waste transfer station on Neachells Lane, Willenhall, and will process more than 50,000 tonnes of road sweepings each year, creating two new jobs and the potential for a further six.
The plant will recycle 98% of the material from the sweepings including sand and grit plus organic material, which can be composted. It features a grit separation and recycling machine known as AggMax which uses twin counter rotating shafts to break up contaminated material and separate out organic material, aggregates and sand.
The recycled sand and aggregates can be reused in road construction, pipe bedding materials or blended with rock salt and used as grit on roads in the winter months. Meanwhile composted organic material – rich in nutrients – is suitable for blending with soils in land remediation projects.
Participating local authorities are forecasting a diversion of nearly 300,000 tonnes of material from landfill across the life of the contract, which is an initial seven years with a potential extension of a further three years.
The procurement exercise was showcased at the October 2011 meeting of the West Midlands Waste Alliance and is now being chronicled as an Improvement and Efficiency West Midlands (IEWM) case study.
SITA
SITA UK already has a large presence in the Midlands, and recently announced plans to build a new recycling and recovery centre in Birmingham, creating up to 150 jobs.
Chris Male, regional processing area manager for SITA UK, said: “The new facility to recycle road sweepings near Wolverhampton will initially create two new jobs, with the potential for more as the site expands. This is another example of the efforts SITA UK goes to in achieving our purpose of protecting the environment by putting waste to good use.
“The investment will allow us to recover recyclable materials from road sweeping waste that is currently landfilled. The recycled sand and aggregates can be reused by many of our customers in road construction, pipe bedding materials or blended with rock salt and used as grit on roads in the winter months.”
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