Waste, Recycling and Environmental

• Waste management encompasses all aspects of waste, such as the collection, transportation and disposal and/or recycling where possible.
• Proper processing of household and industrial waste require strict handling processes to ensure that they meet with health codes and to protect the environment.
• Much of what is considered as waste can be reused, recycled or even composted.
• Most waste and recycling organisations work with local authorities in a close partnership to promote waste management strategies that incorporate the waste hierarchy – involving ‘reuse and recycle’ waste treatment methods, and optimum waste recovery.
• All suppliers in this field have to be fully licensed and comply with legal and environmental legislation.

Waste and Recycling can be politically charged subjects. Issues that often arise with externally delivered waste services are:

• Approximately 40% of local authorities choose to outsource their waste collection and recycling. Of those, the typical challenges that arise are that 81% of citizen complaints regarding waste disposal are upheld by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
• Issues over repeated missed collections
• Concerns over the reducing frequency of collections
• Poor complaints handling
• Bins not being returned to the right location
• Standardised formulaic responses that clearly don’t reflect the symptoms of complaints
• Poor monitoring of reported issues and issues with assisted collections for individuals with mobility challenges
• On the relationship management of the waste contractor, key issues include poor oversight of the contractor’s performance and the council and the contractor providing contradictory information.

• Councils are under severe austerity measures so cannot be everywhere at once across all council services.
• However, there are some key themes to follow to ensure a good service can be provided by Waste and Recycling contractors and minimise complaints from citizens in the process.

By using BPG’s ‘Optimise’ supplier relationship management framework, this will help councils to have the right foundations in place to monitor the collections properly, review how contractors handle citizen complaints and that its responses are accurate and evidence based.

From that, it provides the most cost effective foundations from the evidence, to improve the contractor’s performance, minimise the opportunity for further argument or dispute escalation, and to rebuild commercial trust in the relationship.