William Tracey chosen for 21m Renfrewshire work

The selection of William Tracey Group was revealed via a contract award notice late last week (July 8), and when confirmed will see the Scottish waste management firm take recycling and residual waste material for processing and disposal.

The appointment of William Tracey, which operates at eight sites across Scotland, as preferred bidder comes one week after it also expanded its service by beginning to offer food and organic waste collections (see letsrecycle.com story) in Glasgow.

The council is observing 10-day standstill period following the announcement of the contract's award. This allows Renfrewshire to debrief the unsuccessful bidders before the contract is entered into.

Unitary

As a unitary authority, Renfrewshire council is responsible for household and commercial waste collections, recycling collections and subsequent recovery, treatment or disposal. This also includes the six household waste and recycling centres in the local authority region.

William Tracey will take kerbside waste and recycling material collected by the council's existing in-house collection service, which will continue to operate the service under the new arrangement.

Currently all waste collected in Renfrewshire via household refuse collections is taken to the council-owned waste facility at Linwood, operated by the council's existing waste disposal contractor Waste Recycling Group (WRG). And, Renfrewshire anticipates that the successful bidder would use the Linwood facility for bulking of waste.

In the contract award, it is stated that William Tracey is likely to involve the appointment of sub-contractors to help deliver elements of the waste deal.

William Tracey was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Infrastructure

The council outlined in its contract notice that it would require a successful bidder to provide plant and equipment in order to recover biodegradable waste from the residual waste stream.

And, although it has not expressed a direct link, the selection as preferred bidder coincides with William Tracey's arrangements with renewable energy company Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) to develop a 75,000 tonnes-a-year capacity anaerobic digestion facility at Barkip in Ayrshire (see letsrecycle.com story).

The contract was advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) on March 26 2010, with six bidders applying for the deal.