Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) is a local authority covering 120 000 households. The council engaged a consultancy to develop optimised waste collection rounds following the development of a new strategic waste collection plan that involved changing to alternate week collection of refuse and garden waste in wheeled bins, replacing weekly collection of refuse sacks, and (for 80 % of households) garden waste sacks. A private contractor managed kerbside-sorted weekly dry recycling collection. Sefton Council required the new collection schedule to meet the following objectives:
- high levels of time and fuel efficiency;
- balance workloads across crews and vehicles;
- flexibility to accommodate different productivity rates and yields.
The consultants employed by Sefton MBC had worked with over 50 other local authorities, which enabled them to calibrate their models with regionally applicable productivity rates and yields for different types of households. The modelling identified the minimum number of vehicles and crews required to produce workable rounds to maximise productivity rates and yields. Feedback from the crews was used to refine the round optimisation, and designed rounds were tested for sensitivity to productivity rates and yields.
Sefton MBC said of the work: “The combination of AMEC and Webaspx’s powerful optimisation technology, together with their experience of working with many authorities on round design, has helped us develop a solution of acceptable risk. We feel that the outcome has produced optimised and balanced workloads that will enable the new collection service to be introduced successfully.”
Source: AMEC (no date).