North West Apartments Joining Recycling Revolution
posted in Articles |Councils wishing to ensure that apartment dwellers can recycle more easily now have a new solution.
The nature of the properties - communal waste areas with restricted access for residents and waste collectors, and limited room in the apartments themselves – means that practical difficulties prevent otherwise willing householders from recycling as much as they’d like to.
The knock-on effect for local authorities is that recycling performances can suffer.
However, Plastic Omnium has provided Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) with the answer and residents in 150 apartment blocks can now recycle on their ‘doorstep’.
Plastic Omnium worked with Trafford MBC to develop a series of wheeled bins, each with a different colour lid to represent glass, paper and cans/tins. The bins, ranging from a capacity of 240 litres to 400 litres depending on the number of residents living in the building, are stored next to residual waste bins in common areas and emptied fortnightly by the council’s contractors, Veolia.
Dave Elliott, sales executive at Plastic Omnium, said the coloured lids were crucial in helping people differentiate between waste streams.
“We initially introduced the concept of colour-coded lids for those with limited sight,” said Elliott. “However, feedback indicated that the fully-sighted also found that they helped them recycle more, so we thought it made sense to roll the idea out to a wider audience.”
Paul Harvey, Trafford MBC’s director of environment, said it was important to identify ways of engaging the householders in flats and apartments.
“In Trafford, apartments and flats account for 17 per cent of housing stock. We wanted to make sure people in those properties had an equal chance to contribute to our recycling efforts,” he explained.
Plastic Omnium had already provided Trafford MBC with 48,000, 240-litre green bins for garden waste collections, enabling the council to recycle over 6,000 tonnes of green waste in 2005/6.
Editors’ notes:
NowRecycle.co.uk is a trading style of Plastic Omnium Systems Ltd - a European market leader in waste containment solutions that provides a wide range of waste containers and services including wheeled bins, litter bins, banks, composters and sacks. It is part of the International Plastic Omnium Group, a world leader in contract waste container solutions with worldwide sales of more than £1.8 billion. It employs over 9,000 people in 25 countries, across four continents, in manufacturing and service solutions for the automotive, environment and performance plastic products.
Press Contact: Simon Dutta, N European Marketing Director, Plastic Omnium Urban Systems Ltd
Telephone: 01952 582 583