The 630,000 Liverpool contract, which is to provide fortnightly kerbside paper collections for 150,000 households as well as bring bank services for paper, glass and textiles, is to run until 2008. It is expected to be an important supply of newspapers and magazines for Cheshire Recycling's parent company, Bridgewater Paper in Ellesmere Port.
Although collections for the first 50,000 households in Liverpool began in July, the official launch took place yesterday (10/09/03) at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, just a few days before the second wave of 50,000 properties is added to the purple bag collection service.
 Liverpool recycling: (left to right) Alan Smith, Liverpool waste strategy officer; Rob Humphries, Cheshire Recycling MD; Cllr Ron Gould, Lord Mayor of Liverpool; Cllr Richard Oglethorpe, Liverpool executive member for environment |
Speaking at the launch, the leader of Liverpool city council, Councillor Mike Storey admitted that Liverpool has had a poor record when it comes to recycling, but stated firmly that with the new contract, the council was very much looking to change that.
As the moment, Liverpool recycles just 2% of its annual 200,000 tonnes of household waste – one of the worst councils in England.
Cllr Storey said: “As a city, in terms of recycling, we've got off to a very slow start. To be honest, we've had other priorities – schools, health and so on. But we've got off the blocks now and we're starting to reverse that problem with this new kerbside collection service. Next year we are looking to further extend the service with boxes for other materials, which will hopefully move us up the recycling league table.”
The council hopes the new contract will go some way towards reaching its targets of recycling 8% by 2003-04 and 15% by 2005-06. This will be bolstered by an increase in the city's bring banks from 26 to 100 by the end of the year, and the intention to increase this to about 400 in the long term – the equivalent of one bring bank per 1,000 of the Liverpool population.
Cheshire Recycling's relationship with Liverpool began with its first paper bring bank scheme, launched in January 1994. The company fought fierce competition from waste management companies and the social sector to win the city's first major recycling contract in May 2003 (see letsrecycle.com story).
As well we kerbside collection sub-contractors PD Logistics, the new contract will operate as a partnership that will also include the participation of the community sector. Two of the city's not-for profit organisations, Stanley Environmental and Energywise, will continue to operate their blue bag paper collections from kerbsides in the more difficult North and South Central areas of the city.
Reprocessors
In its management of the contract, Cheshire Recycling has organised an “End User Consortium” of reprocessors other than itself to take the material collected from the bring banks and the kerbside collections when it is expanded to multi-material in year three of the contract. This consortium includes Glass Recycling UK, Alcan, Corus as well as Oxfam and the Salvation Army, who will be taking the textiles.
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