Retail can be a challenging sector to work in. Brutal, unforgiving, with long hours and manual handling for days. This can extend to waste management, the extent of which varies significantly from business to business, which can put pressure on service partners to find practical solutions that provide positive outcomes for all involved.
Westgate Shopping Centre in Stevenage is home to 35 retailers (including coffee shops and restaurants) which produce a variety of waste streams. This centre’s tenants are all environmentally focused, but they do still produce significant volumes of waste, and quite often this waste can be co-mingled through no fault of their own.
A long-time customer of Compact & Bale, the centre has renewed its partnership with us over the last year. Part of this agreement includes replacing their ageing waste compaction equipment.
Our solutions for Westgate Shopping Centre were to supply one of our newly refurbished mobile waste compactors with the aim of hitting 12-tonne payloads (this being the legal road limit for a three-axel rollonoff vehicle.
By upgrading to a more efficient model for their needs, the shopping centre has reduced its transport costs by more than 50%, going from a 6-tonne to a 12-tonne compactor. These are commonplace savings for Compact & Bale’s clients, with savings generally being better invested in special projects, or passed back to tenants as savings on the service charge budget.
This particular compactor model is fitted with a 1100 litre bin tipper, allowing for quick and efficient disposal of waste for the site’s operational team. This ensures that no significant manual handling is required when dealing with waste and allows the centre’s operatives to spend more time on profit-building duties.
The mix of waste from this machine is transported to a manual recovery facility where recyclables are sorted as the waste proceeds through the picking line. The residual waste is then shredded and sent for residual derived fuel (RDF), where it is incinerated to create energy. This process provides a greater energy feed to the grid, rather than when incinerated as loose waste. Another positive result from this is that no waste is sent to landfill.
Westgate also invested in a plastic baling press for its plastic waste and a cardboard baling machine for its cardboard waste. Both of these materials were easily recovered at the point of production. Compact & Bale organises the collection and onward recycling of bales, ensuring the carboard will be used to produce new packaging materials, and the plastic is used to make new films and consumer goods.
These solutions provide the shopping centre with a straightforward operation, achieving both their objectives and those of their tenants and brand partners. Simple, efficient, cost-effective and, most importantly, environmentally sustainable. We are continuing to do our best to maximise recovery of recyclables, reduce emissions, and minimise the loss of valuable finite resources.