News:
Greyparrot’s hybrid AI/Near-Infrared waste recognition system awarded grant
UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging (SSPP) Challenge has announced 30 million in funding collaborative projects that support the achievement of the UK Plastics Pact.
The SSPP Challenge represents the largest Government investment into sustainable plastic packaging and waste management.
Greyparrot, in collaboration with Blue Green Vision, have been awarded 488,000 by UKRI to develop a hybrid AI/Near-Infrared (NIR) waste recognition and monitoring system to provide automated, cost-effective, accurate recognition of plastics waste at scale.
Critically, the system will enable the identification of all types of material and packaging, including the recognition of black plastics and mixed material packaging (e.g sleeved bottles) that confuse current NIR systems; but also distinguishing packaging by usage (e.g food vs non food) and differentiating polymers with a high granularity.
The live recognition data will be integrated with sorting machines and other equipment to add this unique cognitive intelligence to existing infrastructure. This will, in turn, increase the accuracy of plastics sorting including food and non-food grade packaging separation. Furthermore, this recognition capability will be extended to other materials such as scrap metal, WEEE and fibre.
Mikela Druckman, Co-founder & CEO of Greyparrot, commented: “We are thrilled to be working with Blue Green Vision on a new approach to optimise material auditing and sorting at scale, contributing to a stronger UK recycling system. Our ultimate goal is to support the UK Plastics Pact’s target which calls for 70% of plastics packaging to be recycled or composted.”
New Commercial Director for Newry company
Celine Grant has been appointed Commercial Director at Re-Gen Waste and will be responsible for the company’s Public Sector, Commercial, Engineering and R&D Divisions.
She joined Re-Gen Waste in May 2004, holds a BA in Business Studies from Ulster University, and held the post of Product Sales Director until appointed to her new role.
Celine is a board member of the Recycling Association and a member of the Institute of Directors. She won the Women in Business NI Award for Best Exporter in 2011 and 2017; and has been shortlisted in the Outstanding Mentor Award category in 2022.
She takes over from Aidan Doherty who moves to Re-Gen Robotics where he will assist in growing their business which is the only 100 per cent ‘no man entry’ robotic tank cleaning company in the UK and Ireland.
Countrystyle makes Epic move
Kent based waste management firm, Countrystyle Recycling Ltd, selected EPIC Media Group to provide vehicle livery for the company’s first ever domestic waste collection contract for the London Borough of Bexley.
EPIC’s changeable graphics system was selected for the 64 vehicle fleet serving the 10-year contract.
The system comprises a lightweight aluminium frame which is fitted with a removable graphic banner. The system is designed to provide the London Borough of Bexley with the opportunity to use their refuse fleet as a flexible communications tool that acts as a mobile billboard reaching all corners of the borough.
The first set of graphics carry three messages; the first encouraging residents to use the food waste collection service, the second promoting the garden waste service and the third a reminder to think green and keep the Borough clean.
The fleet comprises 37 refuse collection and recycling vehicles and 27 caged tippers. The majority of the fleet has already been fitted with the changeable graphics. The remaining caged tippers will be fitted when they arrive early in 2022.
Trevor Heathcote, Chairman at Countrystyle Recycling Ltd said: “The vehicles look very smart. The changeable graphics system is a great communications tool to support the Council’s position of top London Borough for recycling.”
JobTrak helps operators optimise fleet performance
CMS SupaTrak will exhibit and demonstrate its JobTrak in-cab route management solution at OWL Live Wales, held at Voco St Davids in Cardiff on March 31, 2022.
The event will be hosted by the Chair of CIWM Wales, Brian Royson Mayne and opened by Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield and Chairman of OWL and the Westminster Commission for Road Air Quality. OWL Live Wales features an impressive speaker line-up, with CMS SupaTrak, Welsh Government, the SMTT, Cenex, Bristol Waste and many more.
CMS’s Jason Airey, Sally Cumner, Stephen Strange and David Moorfield will be at hand to demonstrate how JobTrak can significantly improve waste and recycling route management, remove paperwork, and ensure operator compliance.
‘JobTrak is a fantastic resource to improve route management for public sector contracting organisations and other specialist fleet management operations,’ commented CMS SupaTrak’s MD Jason Airey.
‘Come and find out how our JobTrak solution delivers an abundance of benefits, including a real-time overview of driver and vehicle locations and activities. Our solution provides evidence and protection against complaints and missed bins.’
JobTrak is available for domestic, trade and bulky collections, and it incorporates daily vehicle checks and defect reporting. The route optimisation function enables operators to save fuel and avoid congested areas at certain times. It is simple to generate routes from existing data or build up routes with an easy-to-use route management drag and drop function.
Crews can record property exceptions (ie bin not presented or contaminated waste) that the operator can use to prevent unnecessary return visits, thus improving operational efficiency.
JobTrak fully integrates back-office CRM and public-facing systems and the full suite of CMS SupaTrak services, including vehicle DVR camera and safety systems. Users can now easily access the JobTrak solution via CMS’s new app.
To sign up for OWL Live Wales, register here.
To see the programme, click here.
TOMRA Recycling boosts polymer purity at Viridor’s Avonmouth and Skelmersdale plants
Viridor has chosen the very latest in sensor-based sorting technology from TOMRA Recycling for two of its polymer recycling plants.
15 TOMRA AUTOSORT® units and six AUTOSORT® FLAKE units have been installed at Viridor’s flagship polymer recycling and reprocessing plant, part of Viridor’s £317m Avonmouth Resource Recovery Centre near Bristol.
Meanwhile, a new AUTOSORT® FLAKE unit has been installed at Viridor’s Skelmersdale polymer recycling and reprocessing facility in Lancashire, boosting throughput and elevating the purity of PET flakes.
Viridor’s Avonmouth Resource Recovery Centre comprises a co-located energy recovery facility (ERF) and a polymer recycling and reprocessing plant which has an infeed capacity of 80,000tpa. The Avonmouth plant, which officially opens on 3rd March 2022, will be the UK’s largest multi-polymer facility.
When designing the Avonmouth plant, Viridor approached TOMRA directly for an end-to-end solution, having previously successfully used TOMRA’s technology in its other MRFs.
The infeed material at Avonmouth comprises UK-sourced post-consumer packaging. Following a standard mechanical pre-sorting process, the infeed material is split across three dedicated sorting lines, one for PET (polyethylene terephthalate), one for HDPE (high density polyethylene) and one for PP (polypropylene).
15 TOMRA AUTOSORT® units pre-sort the material then six AUTOSORT® FLAKE units are used for flake sorting. The AUTOSORT® features sophisticated infrared sorting technology which combines near infrared (NIR) and visual spectrometers (VIS).
This combination quickly and accurately identifies and separates different materials according to their material type and colour, extracting high-purity high-value end fractions that command higher market prices.
Once the material has been pre-sorted by the AUTOSORT® units, six AUTOSORT® FLAKE units sort the material to the highest purity levels required by Viridor for onward sale as food-grade material. At Viridor Avonmouth, the four targeted end fractions are clear PET, natural HDPE, jazz HDPE and polypropylene (PP).
In total, Viridor Avonmouth will put 60,000 tonnes of recycled polymer from bottles, pots, tubs and trays back in the economy annually as a viable and quality alternative to virgin polymer, including 18,000 tonnes of food-grade PET.
With TOMRA’s equipment in place, Viridor is achieving a constant purity level of >99% across all target fractions, resulting in Viridor securing new end customers in UK and Europe, including companies whose quality requirements for food-grade PET are particularly high.
UKCM Secures Place on Prestigious Scotland Excel Framework
Repair and refurbishment specialist UK Container Maintenance (UKCM) has been awarded a position on the Scotland Excel framework, following a rigorous application and selection process.
For the first time in the company’s history, UKCM has secured a four-year place on the framework where it is one of only three suppliers within the category. UKCM now has the invaluable opportunity to trade with all 32 local authorities in Scotland, and will embark on a series of face-to-face meetings with each to advise on UKCM’s services and how significant cost-savings can be made, with waste container refurbishment amounting to a third of the price of buying new.
Richard Delooze, Sales Director (pictured) at UKCM comments: “Scotland Excel is highly-regarded and we are delighted be awarded a sought-after place on this framework, enabling us to support local authorities across Scotland.
“At UKCM we work with a significant number of councils throughout the UK and look forward to developing relationships with Scottish local authorities, sharing our expertise and helping them to save substantial amounts of money on the maintenance of their waste and recycling containers.”
Established as the Centre of Procurement Expertise in 2008 for the local government sector, Scotland Excel is a leading non-profit organisation serving the 32 local authorities in Scotland and over 100 associate members from across the public and third sector.
CRJ Services Ltd is announced as the exclusive dealer for JENZ GmbH
CRJ Services Ltd announces an exclusive dealership agreement with German machine manufacturer JENZ GmbH Maschinen und Fahrzeugbau, for the UK and Ireland.
This announcement comes off the back of a period of sustained growth for CRJ Services, it says. The new dealership agreement commenced on the 1 February 2022.
Hans Heinrich Hermeier, Managing Director at JENZ GmbH, said: “I am sure that with CRJ we have a strong partner by our side and I am pleased that we can guarantee our British and Irish customers exceptional support.”
JENZ GmbH is a manufacturer of mobile and static high-speed shredders and chippers. The addition of these machines to the CRJ Services sales portfolio will allow them to offer a comprehensive range of machinery solutions to the forestry, waste management, recycling, and biomass industries.
Speaking on the announcement, CRJ Services Director, Ben McQuaid said; “CRJ Services is looking forward to supporting new and existing JENZ customers with machinery requirements, including equipment sales, servicing, and parts. The JENZ brand is renowned for its quality and has a dedicated customer base that we will look to support and expand over the coming years.”
The JENZ high-speed shredders and mobile chippers will complement CRJ Services existing shredder offering alongside the HAAS TYRON which has long been a market leading slow-speed shredder.
Aside from the addition of JENZ to their sales portfolio, CRJ Services will be adding the JENZ high-speed shredder range to their existing hire fleet of over 100 mobile machines.
Rob Symons – Director at CRJ Services Ltd, said: “We are very pleased to be adding the JENZ brand to our machinery portfolio, in both our sales, hire and parts divisions. As a company, we have a lot of experience with high-speed shredders having run them in our hire fleet for many years, and the expansion into the chipper market is something we are all very excited for.
Updates:
Yotta reimagines waste Management with Alloy
By Yotta
Alloy, the connected asset management platform from Yotta, continues to gain traction with local authorities, contracted environmental service providers and private companies as they digitise their waste management operations.
The company recently announced it had secured a contract with North-East Lincolnshire Council to supply it with a cloud-hosted environmental services management system to support the council’s waste collection, cleansing, green spaces and beaches.
Additionally, a series of partnerships involving Alloy, together with developments of the platform, further extend its capabilities. Integrated route-optimisation technology helps customers better streamline their planning of waste collection and other environmental and maintenance services, ensuring crews follow the most direct and fuel-efficient routes and that they keep to agreed customer collection slots.
Further, IoT sensor technology allows authorities and contractors to monitor waste bins around the clock, enabling them to optimise their collection schedules and use the data generated to schedule collections, track missed pick-ups and reduce overflows. Thereby helping users to make significant resource savings and enhance their efficiency.
Commenting, Andy Peart, Yotta said “There are many challenges facing providers of waste management and environmental services in the current economic and political climate, but the primary challenge remains: how to do more with less? Costs continue to increase, and funding is constrained.”
There are many challenges facing providers of waste management and environmental services in the current economic and political climate, but the primary challenge remains: how to do more with less? Costs continue to increase, and funding is constrained.
“Here, at Yotta, we’ve designed a platform that can be a single solution for asset management and environmental service delivery across an entire organisation. Our platform, combined with our decades of experience collecting and analysing operational data, puts us in a position to help waste and environmental service providers reduce costs and improve the quality of the services they provide.”
Alloy transforms the management of the built world to create safer, cleaner and more sustainable places for everyone. It enables users to visualise and understand the exact location of every bin and waste-asset, better plan and manage collection process and manage outstanding jobs.
Specifically designed in-cab software tracks progress, automatically delivering updates from collection crews. Further datasets and information from other service areas that might affect waste management workflow, for example scheduled road works, or transportation service schedules, are immediately available from within Alloy to help users better manage their overall approach to environmental services.
Wood Recyclers’ Association Gains CPD Approval
The Wood Recyclers’ Association is delighted to announce that our meetings, workshops and events can now be used towards Continuing Professional Development for our members.
The WRA has been accredited by The CPD Certification Service, meaning our first quarterly members’ meeting of 2022, which takes place on 9th March, will be worthy of CPD points for members who belong to professional bodies requiring evidence of learning covered by topics on our agenda.
The decision to apply for CPD accreditation was taken by the WRA Board earlier this year. Julia Turner, Executive Director of the WRA, said the move to offer CPD accreditation further enhances the benefits of being a member of the WRA.
Julia said: “We recognised that our meetings often cover very in-depth topics about issues important in the waste and recycling sector, with many learning opportunities for delegates who attend. It therefore seemed the natural progression to have the meetings formally recognised as a learning experience.
“Members who belong to professional bodies in their own areas of expertise will be able to apply for CPD points towards their required learning by attending our meetings, as long as the topics covered are relevant to the learning they are required to undertake.”
The WRA’s March meeting agenda includes presentations covering the importance of waste wood in the UK’s biomass policy, the potential benefits of using HVO as an alternative to diesel fuel and key environmental regulatory developments for the sector, presented by the Environment Agency.
Members attending who wish to apply for CPD points from the meeting will need to inform the WRA, who will liaise with the CPD Accreditation Service and a certificate will then be issued.
New Managing Director at NTM GB
Grahame Jones has been appointed as the new managing director for NTM GB.
Paul Westley is retiring from NTM GB at the end of April 2022, after 18 successful years in which time he has successfully grown NTM GB into a market leader for refuse collection vehicles in the UK.
Grahame said: “I am so proud to be taking on Paul’s legacy at NTM GB. At NTM GB we have a great reputation for excellent products, innovative solutions and dedicated customer service, so I am very much looking forward to working with our great team in building on those values going forward.
