The overall aim of the trials, which will run for six months, is to develop convenient and cost effective services to make it easier for small and medium sized enterprises to recycle.
The trials will assess recycling schemes for the construction and commercial food industries, site-specific services for business parks and industrial estates and collection schemes for small retailers and offices. Factors assessed will include effective ways to recruit SMEs on to recycling services, collection techniques and frequencies and charging mechanisms.
Liz Morrish, WRAP’s SME recycling programme manager, said: “SMEs cover a vast range of businesses that all have different recycling needs – either because of the relative low quantity of recyclable materials they produce, the space available to store materials or their location. These feasibility trials will give us a much better picture of the kind of recycling services that will work cost effectively for SMEs and therefore encourage these businesses to start recycling their waste.”
Commercial food waste trials will investigate the best methods of diverting food waste from landfill for a range of different businesses. Bexley Council will work with local restaurants, cafes and takeaways to develop convenient collection services for their food waste and ECT Recycling will collect kitchen waste from restaurants, pubs, cafes and takeaways in the Bristol and Bath areas.
Urban Mines is project managing trials in West Yorkshire, East Lancashire and Greater Manchester, which focus on collecting and composting food waste from commercial food manufacturers and processors. The Centre for Environmental Studies in the Hospitality Industry (CESHI) at Oxford Brookes University will also be working with six hotels that will be composting their food waste on site.
Five of the trials will investigate the best method of collecting recyclable waste from business parks and industrial estates. Axion Recycling and Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council will target 12 industrial estates in the Stockport area to encourage them to recycle paper, cardboard and plastic through the use of shared collection facilities on the estates. Groundwork Yorkshire and the Humber will be providing a recycling facility for businesses at the Langthwaite Grange Industrial Estate, in Wakefield, West Yorkshire and The Laundry, part of Bioregional Development Group, will be working with multi-tenancy buildings in central London to reduce office waste and encourage recycling.
Bridgend
In Wales, Bridgend County Borough Council is working in partnership with Greenwood Services Ltd, Groundwork Bridgend and Neath Port Talbot to boost recycling on the Brackla/Litchard Industrial Estate in Bridgend by collecting mixed recyclables such as paper, glass, cans, plastic and cardboard.
In Scotland, LEEP Recycling, part of the sustainable development charity Changeworks, will be targeting 15 business parks and industrial estates in Edinburgh and Lothian to collect mixed recyclables. The businesses can choose from 1,100 litre bins or desk-high boxes for smaller quantities of materials and either regular pick-ups or on demand collections.
Storage
Three schemes will collect general recyclables from small businesses. Mid Devon Community Recycling aims to provide a flexible recycling service for small businesses in more rural areas and First Mile, based in central London, is targeting small city-based retailers and offices to develop an appropriate recycling collection service for businesses who have little or no storage space.
In Scotland, LEEP Recycling aims to collect redundant IT equipment such as PCs, laptops, printers, faxes and monitors from 150 small businesses. Working in partnership with Restructa, who specialise in recycling redundant computers, the scheme will have no minimum collection quantity, to encourage businesses with only a small amount of equipment to participate.
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