Under the deal, Bedfordshire will send 50,000 tonnes of paper, card, metal, plastic food packaging and textiles collected from householders each year to the plant Community Waste runs on behalf of Milton Keynes council.
Community Waste is currently bidding for the long-term contract to run the Milton Keynes facility (see letsrecycle.com story) but will send material to its other MRF at Enstone in Oxfordshire in the long-term if necessary.
Philip Serfaty, co-director of Community Waste, told letsrecycle.com: “This is a success story, we have got the public putting the stuff out and we have the quality of material and markets for the material. Over the past months, we have had this concern in commodity prices but still the goods are moving to a wide range of markets.”
Mr Serfaty said that the longest trip to deliver material to the plant would be 25 miles but this would be offset by the ability of the plant to process 93,000 tonnes of material each year and supply the majority of its end product to domestic markets.
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire county council announced in January that it intended to minimise its existing material sorting contract with Shanks Group to 10,000 tonnes-a-year and instead award a new deal to Community Waste after deciding it wanted to increase the range of materials it could process (see letsrecycle.com story).
Andrew Smith, assistant director of waste services at Bedfordshire, said: “There were facilities around Peterborough as well that offered us the capacity of Milton Keynes but when we were distilling it down to what we wanted to do, the Milton Keynes facility offered more volumes and materials.”
“This new system works alongside the distribution of wheeled bins in Bedfordshire and alternate weekly collections in South Bedfordshire, which means we can send 50,000 tonnes to the MRF and the remaining 10,000 tonnes to Shanks,” he added.
In addition to increasing its material range, the council claimed that the use of an online ‘e-auction' for the contract helped save it around £1 million in costs.
Milton Keynes
The Milton Keynes MRF is owned by Milton Keynes council and is currently operated by Community Waste on an “income generating agreement”.
Although not assured the contract beyond spring 2009, Milton Keynes praised the work of Community Waste and said that the facility offered a viable option to local councils for processing material collected at the kerbside and was an example of a regional facility being possible away from major urban centres.
Chris Carvell, waste operations manager at Milton Keynes council, said: “That is where the Milton Keynes MRF comes in, it is very attractive and can separate a variety of streams and the technology is there to help separate more material. It makes sense to use it as a regional facility.”
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