Addressing councils and contractors at the event in London, Mr Davies explained that the company may have inherited a culture of “poor performance” from the previous contractor on the source separated round but that it would still need to address the types of receptacle being used.
He said: “I have got contracts relatively of the same size, with 100 vehicles on each. One is a commingled contract, that is in the South, and in the North of the country I have got a hand sorting at the kerbside contract and if we look at them you can see that the hand sorting has got ten lost time incidents – resulting in 145 days lost – and the commingled contract only has one incident, resulting in 11 days lost.”
However, Andy Bond, environmental services developmental director at waste and services firm May Gurney – which took over source-separated specialist ECT last year – criticised the assumption that source separated led to more accidents and said that areas in which May Gurney had introduced the system had seen an improvement in health and safety performance.
Responding to this, Mr Davies said: “There are two things I need to do, which is look at the types of the receptacles and it also may be something about the environment. A wider study on commingled and source separated is needed because it might just be a one off but is seems like too much of a coincidence.”
HSE
Also speaking at the event, Chantal Nicholls, the principal inspector for waste at the Health and Safety Executive, highlighted the fall in accidents in the waste sector between 2003/04 and 2007/08, when the industry grew significantly. Ms Nicholls said she that this decline equated to a fall of around 800 injuries per year (see letsrecycle.com story).
However, Ms Nicholls, who took over the post from former principal inspector for waste Paul Harvey in April, said that the industry was still in need of improvement and was one of the most dangerous professions, with an accident rate ten times the national industry average.
Ms Nicholls also discussed the HSE's ‘Safe Collection Guidance' produced in conjunction with the Waste Industry Safety and Health (WISH) Forum – which advocates health and safety in the industry.
Identifying the need to take health and safety into account while devising new collection schemes, Ms Nicholls said it remained important even when contracts were contracted out that health and safety remained a “shared responsibility” (see letsrecycle.com story).
And, Ms Nicholls claimed that it was important that councils remember the need to assess routes before undertaking any new system.
“Risk assessment is not a new concept and it can be applied at many levels,” she said. “The aim is to do as much as possible before crews get out on their rounds”.
Merton
Delegates also heard from Cormac Stokes of the London borough of Merton, who discussed the council's decision to change its waste and recycling collections by dividing the borough into five colour-coded zones and introducing commingled collections (see letsrecycle.com story).
The existing system, which saw the borough split into seven zones, was introduced in 2004 but the council said it had to put extra vehicles on to deal with the fact it didn't divide exactly into 35 beats and also led to some instances of vehicles being on rounds with excess capacity but unable to move out of their beat due to the disruption it would cause the system.
In introducing the new system, Merton had to register all its properties to a database in order to map the most efficient routes and this had to be improved by human knowledge of physical barriers such as school zones in order to ensure the scheme would run smoothly in reality.
Mr Stokes said: “We tested some of the routes that we were not sure of and they were also able to examine some of the impacts of the scheme, such as working around railway lines and physical barriers such as school times.”
Councillor David Simpson, cabinet member for environment at Merton, added: “All in all the project has been successful but we are not leaving it as a job done and dusted but the easier we make it for residents to recycle the better our recycling rate will be and the less waste we will have to send to landfill.”
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