A good industry colleague of ours at Bintel, let's call him Guran, once said:
"80% of our Recycling room have the wrong cost"
Well-designed Recycling room is poison for both environmental goals and savings projects at our housing companies. Skeva subscriptions create unnecessary Residual waste and drive unnecessary costs. These are the facts.
We at Bintel aim to have 1001 Recycling room connected by 2023, and would like to take this opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of our colleague's statement.
What's true, what's false, and what's a little too old jungle lingo? What do we mean when we say that a Recycling room is wrong-sized? It can be a few different things, so let's clarify the concepts.
Overcapacity
Often we see overcapacity for certain fractions, for example having a scheduled emptying of waste containers that takes place at too low levels. Thus, if there was an understanding of the levels at which waste was emptied, this could have been done less frequently or the subscription reduced to fewer containers. This would result in an immediate financial saving, and possibly savings in transport costs if the emptying intervals could be extended.
Undercapacity
By undercapacity we mean waste management, where the containers become full before the time of emptying. This is highly annoying, as it often leads to littering and poor sorting as a result. Saving money on containers for packaging, we often see, results in an increase in Residual waste. A sub-optimization for the environment and the bottom line.
Furthermore, such sizing can result in a poor sorting culture, as residents do not feel it makes sense to sort out certain fractions. "It's always full anyway."
Therefore, it can be tricky to identify these problems sometimes, at least without data. Addressing this shortcoming often rewards more reduced costs for Residual waste and reduced environmental impact.
Sorting area
Often we see that Recycling room is small in size. In order to avoid situations of under-capacity, waste has to be collected very often. This forces unnecessary heavy traffic into the residential environment, as well as often being charged by the waste management companies for high frequency collection.
Avoiding this requires an understanding of waste management at the drawing board, so that environmental spaces are given the space they need. Other reactive solutions would be to move certain fractions outside the environmental rooms, into drum cabinets or Underground container. Emergency solutions that make waste management more difficult for residents - a road they do not want to travel.
Sorting level
Furthermore, it can be discussed whether a collection point should be sized according to the current sorting rate or according to a desired sorting rate. Many Recycling room are equipped with bins to correspond to a rather sad sorting, but it matches the current situation. Is this right or wrong?
So was Guran right?
If we assume that a Recycling room should have either under- or over-capacity to be considered as wrong-sized. That is, at least one of the top two situations is met.
Then we see that more than 90% of our Recycling room are wrongly dimensioned today. Using data collection, we can thus find wrong sizing in almost all Recycling room we analyse.
Given the developments we see in the packaging industry, where the collection of paper and plastic packaging has increased by about one hundred percent over the last decade, it is clear that it is mainly a question of timing. Perhaps these Recycling room were correctly sized once upon a time, but not anymore.
At the rate of change we are seeing today, anything that is right now is likely to be wrong in 5 years.
So Guran, you were right a few years ago, but:
"Getting the cost of waste right is a commodity"
New jungle proverb