Onyx

WASTE MANAGEMENT: COMPLIANCE AND INTEGRATION

The waste industry is at a critical stage in its development. An unfavourable market in 2002, coupled with a less than bright start to 2003, has heralded an air of uncertainty and concern in this country about how to effectively manage and minimise its waste.

There are several key issues here that together form the basis of huge debate, both inside and outside the waste industry, which consequently affects the policy-making decisions of national and European government.

I personally believe that the future belongs to integrated waste-management contracts. An integrated contract is a region-wide solution, which can combine a variety of elements of waste management such as collection, disposal, minimisation, recovery and recycling. The most common element that integrated contracts generally refer to is disposal. For example, Onyx has integrated contracts in Sheffield, Hampshire and in the recently won east Sussex. However, only the Sheffield contract includes refuse collection, whereas all of the above involve waste disposal.

In order to correctly manage and optimise the waste flow, there is a need to operate different waste facilities together and to have a long-term commitment to the process to help achieve the goal of sustainable waste solutions. Our business starts from the source (that is, collection of the waste) and follows it through to treatment (or recycling) and then final disposal. Properly handling the collection side, and combining that with a high-quality service, provides a major impetus for efficiency in terms of recycling and energy from waste so as to minimise the final residue after disposal. However, the optimum effects can only really be attained by way of serious long-term commitment to this method of waste management.

Invest to optimise
Investment is key. As an employer, we need to continually invest in people and, of course, processes (vehicles, machinery, etc) to enable the company to achieve the highest levels of productivity. In order to invest in and successfully manage an entire infrastructure, volume becomes an important consideration: to me it is better to group together towns and cities when applying for tenders, hence the reason we tendered for the east Sussex contract as a whole, alongside the contract within Brighton and Hove.

However, it must be noted that huge capital and labour investments are needed for the treatment and disposal of waste, and these are taken to extreme levels for recycling and energy from waste. It is virtually impossible to amortise on a short-term basis, for these type of projects it takes approximately 20 years! Even landfill requires long-term protection and commitment so that it can meet its legislative targets. It is important, therefore, to keep one's investments in check and try to make sure that the cost of labour and productivity does not outweigh the value of the 'product' - in this case, the contract.

The client and the customer understandably want to see that they are getting good value for money. Some contracts are now worth millions of pounds and such a high investment needs the security of knowledge that they will be receiving a high-quality service in return. For example, Onyx recently signed a 25-year contract with East Sussex County Council worth nearly £1bn. The contracted company, on the other hand, needs to ensure at tender stage that the price is sufficient to provide a sustained and effective service. The pricing structure has to take into consideration the various investments that will need to take place to ensure the demands of the contract are properly met. This cyclical effect highlights again the importance of investment in people and processes.

Training is the core basis for installing the right mindset within the company and to ensure the provision of a thoroughly professional service. Without it, the only option seems to be to float from one set of staff, transferred under Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (TUPE) Regulations, to another who will, of course, have their own conditions and regulations. Indeed, the main point of the TUPE Regulations is that the employee who is transferred to the company - from either the local authority or private firm that previously looked after the contract - keeps the same conditions of employment that he or she had previously.

When you start a contract with your own set of people you can train and mould them into having the right frame of mind to match your company's ethos, but when they are transferred from another company or local authority, with its own individual approach, it becomes much more difficult to do so. However, this has to be seen as a challenge to be overcome, rather than a problem to be encountered.

The nature of the investment a waste company may make is likely to be dependent on whether it is going for a collection-based contract, a disposal-based contract or a fully integrated 'all-in-one' contract. To reiterate my view, for optimisation I believe a company needs to be competent in collection, treatment and disposal contracts and should aim for geographical investment in these types of tender. In this way, if a company has its refuse collection under control in one region, they can then dispose of it in their own treatment facilities elsewhere in the region, thus enabling the control of standards and practices while simultaneously lowering the risk of depreciation of their fixed assets.

Cost solutions
Of course, everything has a cost and the important thing is that, on a national level, we do not get carried away with theoretically wonderful, yet practically unworkable 'dreams' of how to effectively deal with the waste mountain. As much as we would all love to see 100 per cent recycling and zero waste, unfortunately reality dictates that this is a highly improbable solution. Aside from the difficulties encountered surrounding waste awareness among the general public and trying to educate residents to recycle as much as possible, there are more tangible considerations that severely limit such a goal. As ever, the most notable factor is cost. An increase in recycling levels equates to an increase in cost of kerbside collections, which in turn proves very costly at treatment level and for the service in total. While it is a fair argument to suggest that perhaps we should not all be so money-driven when the environment is at stake, the simple fact of the matter is that everything has a cost - where is the funding going to come from to try and achieve laudable, yet implausible goals?

This is not to suggest that we should abandon all recycling initiatives simply because they are expensive to implement; more that a mixture of various cost-effective methods of controlling waste levels for all parties concerned is needed. A policy stating that we will only recycle would prove extremely costly and the questions that seriously need posing are whether or not people are collectively ready and willing to pay more, and if it is indeed worth it, overall, both in economical and environmental terms.

Within the whole waste-management process, one significant piece of the game - the one which arguably causes the greatest controversy in this country - is energy from waste or, to use the term which ruffles the most feathers, incineration. There are too many misconceptions within this debate and I urge people not to be influenced by radical views that incineration is overly toxic. Once such an opinion has been circulated, it creates negative consequences. Waste holds less economic value if it goes to landfill, rather than towards energy recovery for heat and power to homes and buildings across the land. Incineration is a modern and relatively clean process and to omit it from the waste-management mix is to miss an opportunity for greater waste recovery.

Respecting the rules
The final point I wish to make, which I touched on earlier, is that compliance with legislation is absolutely vital. There are various pressures within the industry to be flexible with the rules, to cut corners here and there, but if there is no respect for the laws the result will be a lack of investment in productive landfill sites, high service levels and a clean, sustainable environment. We have to invest for the long term, but this cannot be supported if other players do not respect the rules. For example, there are several cases of hazardous waste being dumped cheaply in landfill instead of being forced to undergo proper treatment. In the long run, if this continues, companies will not obtain the right return on their investments. There is a strong need to apply the rules and be stringent with penalties, particularly for hazardous waste.

In summary, I believe that the way forward for a true sustainable waste solution lies in integrated contracts, and that it is important to try and combine collection and disposal contracts within a geographical area. Investment is crucial, but sensible and realistic decisions need to be made regarding recycling and energy from waste. However, what matters more than any of the above is full compliance with all legislation, as without it we have little hope of achieving anything.

Supplied by courtesy of Cyrille du Peloux, Chief Executive, Onyx Environmental Group