LARAC 2010 award winners announced

Along with three other award winners, all were recognised at an awards ceremony held last week (November 3) alongside the annual conference of (LARAC), the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee, in Liverpool.

At the city's historic St. George's Hall, the awards were presented by the compere for the evening, Dick Strawbridge, renowned for television appearances including 'Scrapheap Challenge' and 'It's not easy being green'.

All the finalists won praise from the moustachioed Dick Strawbridge, a retired Lieutenant Colonel, who said: “What you have all done, all the finalists, is show how much good work is being done to help promote recycling and create a more sustainable planet.

“It is great to be at this event, and celebrate some of the marvellous success stories shown here by our 20 finalists and I would like to congratulate them all.”

Communications

The first award was for Best Communications Campaign of the Year, sponsored by the LARAC Celebration Awards event partner, UPM. 

Winner of the award was Medway Council for its campaign with a festive theme to increase recycling rates amongst residents who were already participating in their recycling service as well as to encourage others to recycle. The campaign increased the number of avid recyclers from 8% to 38%.

Partnership

The second category was the Best Partnership Award, sponsored by Viridor, with entrants encouraged to highlight how their partnership
increased recycling rates by impacting a target audience.

The winner was Aberdeenshire Council which had developed a partnership with farming firms Medlock & Medlock and Bara Farming Company and the haulage company BB Christoffersen to set up bulking facilities for waste paper in areas where the council had none. This helped the council to roll out a full kerbside recycling collection service to
70% of households in Aberdeenshire.

Target Success

The third award for the evening was a new category this year, recognising the local authority which has shown considerable progress in the judges' view in growing their recycling rates. The award, the Best Improved Recycling Rates (Target Success) was sponsored by the Waste Recycling Group.

The winner of the awards was South Oxfordshire District Council, with a recycling rate that has risen from 43% in 2008/2009 to 64% in 2009/2010 with rates of almost 70% since then thanks largely to
alternate weekly collections and weekly food waste collections.

Minimisation

The fourth category was for Best Waste Minimisation or Prevention Project and was sponsored by Enterprise.

The winner was the London Borough of Hackney, which worked at a grass roots level to reduce organic waste to landfill, by introducing a community compost scheme and utilising the ‘grow your own' momentum to sustain these changes.

The work was conceived as tackling a gap in the inner city council's waste strategy. Work also included developing a school's pack of composting and recycling information and activities.

Recycling Officer of the Year

The final award was for the Recycling Officer of the Year 2010, sponsored by YELL, publisher of the Yellow Pages directory, yell.com and 118 247. 

The award went with a cheer from the audience to Julie Flynn who has worked for Manchester City Council's Waste & Recycling team since 2006.

Julie was the officer responsible for designing, planning, monitoring and communicating new recycling facilities to 50,000 flats, 35,000 of which had no recycling services at all.

Working with collection crews, housing associations and private landlords Julie managed to deliver this service to all but a few buildings within the year – a task many had thought impossible.

Drawing the evening to a close, Joy Blizzard, chair of LARAC, thanked all the sponsors and entrants for the 2010 awards and gave her congratulations to the finalists and winners.