Field staff employed by Lewes District Council are able to electronically gather information on the pocket PCs based on participation rates as well as status information such as “collected” or “contaminated”. The system has been developed by Mayrise Systems of Dursley, Gloucester.
Details are then downloaded form the councils central system, called MAYRISE for analysis; and in addition a link is provided to the council’s GIS system – an increasing popular system which allows mapping and more detailed analysis to be incurred on any given dataset.
The pilot scheme covers 1250 properties in Lewes. Residents put out two boxes, one for paper and the other for cans, clean foil and plastic bottles, from which, environment and services manager Andy Bryce said, “live information can be gathered to assess how well the scheme is working.
“Statistics will show information such as low set out rates or whether participants are contaminating collections with glass bottles instead of plastics and so on. This allows us to target our scarce educational and promotional resources at low performing areas but also to create much more accurate business plans for the continued roll-out of the service to other areas,” he commented.
The council hopes to extend the scheme to Newhaven and if successful, Bryce said applications for the device could be extended beyond analysis of neighbourhood recycling and onto other council services.
Funding
Earlier this month, Lewis District Council secured DEFRA funding to support kerbside recycling schemes in the areas of Lewes, Newhaven and Seaford, totalling around 398,650.
After the award has been announced, Mr Bryce said: “By April 2003, all of Lewes, Newhaven and around 1500 properties in Seaford will be covered by the kerbside collections, although this would exclude blocks of flats.
He added: “We will set up another 20 bring recycling sites for glass, and make developments to the Community Recycling Centre in Lewes so that it can take the additional material that we collect.”
Lewes District Council plans to reach its target of recycling 18% of all household waste by 2003 / 2004, which is about 6,000 tonnes in total. This compares to 3,019 tonnes recycled in 2001 / 2002.
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