Waste not want not: the market's worth £525m
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It is the biggest field for municipal commercial vehicle involvement, but Cleanaway claims to be the largest private company in this sphere. David Wilcox has been talking to this firm's chief engineer
1:0INCIDENTALLY our public JtiRies and municipal number his year is concurrent with the nstitute of Wastes Manage-nent's conference and exhibi:ion at Scarborough (a report 'rpm this next week).
This is quite apt since the job )f waste disposal is the field in tvhich most local councils and nunicipalities have their largest nvolvement in commercial iehicle operation. The total ovaste market in Great Britain is .Bstimated to be worth about £525m a year of which only 30 per cent is in the hands of private enterprise.
With a turnover of £30m a year Cleanaway claims to be the largest waste management corn pany in the private sector. Note the term waste management, suggesting the cleaner, more professional image that the industry is striving to portray.
The study of history is usually justified on the grounds that a look at the past gives a clue to the future. Cleanaway's history has been short but dynamic. The name itself is only just over a year old and is a result of a corn bined GKN and Brambles Industries take-over of the Redland Purle waste disposal business in December 1980. Brambles Industries is an Australian company already big in waste disposal in its homeland and the GKNBrambles Industries partnership has proved itself in the GKN Chep pallet pool.
Since this major step Cleanaway has continued to take an increasing share of the waste disposal market by acquiring small/medium independents in the business. This has given Cleanaway a truly national identity with 27 depots, 350 commercial vehicles and around 1,000 employees.
The waste disposal market can be divided into three sectors; domestic (household refuse); trade and commercial (shops, offices and small businesses); and industrial (larger factories and plant). Following the pattern set by Redland Purle, Cleanaway has concentrated mainly on the industrial sector.
The drawback to this policy is that in the last couple of years the industrial waste market has been shrinking (albeit slowly) because industrial waste is directly linked to industrial output. In addition to this, the effect has been heightened as many manufacturing companies have grown more careful with their waste "housekeeping."
However, the domestic and trade/commercial sectors have been growing as an ever-increasing amount of waste is produced and, anxious not to miss out on a growth market, Cleanaway has therefore decided to turn its attention to the collection of domestic refuse.
This trend for private enterprise to bid for the local council's traditional work has been hitting the headlines and Cleanaway has been watching with interest — particularly since Exclusive Cleansing has been making such a success of the job at Southend, just a few miles down the road from Cleanaway's head office in Leigh-on-Sea.
Cleanaway's chief engineer Mike Heywood told me that there are about 16 million tonnes of domestic refuse to be collected and disposed of each year, a job that he estimated to be worth in the region of £400m — "and that's too big to ignore."
The company currently has several tenders in with local authorities and the breakthrough may not be far away. Brambles in Australia already holds over 30 such municipal contracts and Cleanaway maintains that this expertise and experience would be transferable to this country.
At present the company's involvement with domestic refuse in this country is limited to some contracts with local authorities to move refuse from transfer stations to landfill sites. This involves a growing amount of mileage as landfill sites close to the urban areas are infilled and new sites further away have to be found. In the case of London and some major conurbations like Greater Manchester it is common to haul refuse 40-50 miles to the landfill sites.
Cleanaway owns 10 sites and two incineration plants, and when approached by an industrial customer to handle a waste disposal contract it will chemically analyse the waste to decide whether it is best buried or incinerated; occasionally the larger customers will dictate the method to be used.
Among Cleanaway's sites is Pitsea, the largest in the country and with a chequered history. This is not a conventional landfill site (ie a worked-out pit) but a marshland reclamation scheme. Pitsea covers 1,300 acres of which Cleanaway has permission for .600 acres and will ultimately build up the level by an average of 10 metres.
"Co-disposal" techniques are being used at Pitsea whereby liquid industrial waste is put on dry domestic refuse. This tends to arouse public fears but Cleanaway says they are unfounded; most industrial liquid waste tends to be acidic whereas domestic refuse is normally alkaline so the two neutralise each other.
The increased length of haul to landfill sites is a strong incentive for waste disposal operators to get the actual transport of the waste as efficient as possible. Cleanaway's fleet record demonstrates how it has been working to achieve this. A couple of years ago when it was still Redland Purle the fleet strength was 420. Although the tonnage being moved has not fallen the fleet was down to 320 a few months ago, although it has now risen to 350 following the recent acquisition of three smaller companies.
Mike Heywood explained that the fleet can be divided into 100 tankers and 250 dry-waste vehicles. The proportion of tankers is on the decrease, reflecting the general drop in the amount of liquid industrial waste; many industries are taking care to extract the re-usable content in their waste.
The reduction in Cleanaway's dry waste fleet has been largely brought about by the introduction of mobile compactors. These versatile and highly productive vehicles compress loose refuse by a factor of just over 4:1 and Mike Heywood estimated that each one is doing the work of four conventional skip vehicles.
Cleanaway has 35 mobile compactors, some of which are front loaders (where the arms come over the cab and pick up 6 or 8cuyd containers and empty them into the top of the compactor) while the others are rear loaders which reverse onto slightly larger containers (usually 12-14cuyd) and empty them into the back of the compactor body.
To get maximum productivity Mike Heywood said that ideally he would have liked all the com pactors to be on eight-wheelers, but this has not been possible. The rear loaders are on smaller, six-wheel chassis because they are easier to manoeuvre when reversing to pick up containers. The six-wheeled rear-loading compactors can compress 100120cuyd of loose refuse into 27cuyd while the eight-wheeled front loaders compact 150160cuyd into 41cuyd. The compaction equipment is mainly ipplied by Jack Allen or Lacre. The other six and eight-wheel lassis in the Cleanaway fleet -e either tankers for industrial quid waste or have demountale roll-on containers. These )1I-ons are another piece of veratile equipment taking 30Ocuyd containers that can ther be completely demounted r tipped like a conventional tip9r. Cleanaway favours Bough)n or Ampliroll roll-on equiplent, mostly on eight-wheelers. At the lightest end of the dry aste fleet are the 16-ton-gvw onventional skip vehicles iainly equipped with Powell uffryn or MacKrill equipment. leanaway has a policy of refurishing this equipment wher/tar possible — Mike Heywood lid that this gives a second life : half the cost of buying new. Current choice for Cleanaay's rigid tankers is Whale or uckingham. The company has ng been searching for the ideal nk lining; a material that will resist attack from a wide range of acidic or alkaline liquid wastes that may have to be carried. Until recently Cleanaway found that a type of grp was the nearest to this universal lining, but it was far from ideal. Now, it has been trying a new material called Kynar which is distantly related to the non-stick material used on frying pans — but very much more expensive at around £25 a square foot to apply. Early results look promising and this could be the choice for the future.
When it comes to choice of chassis a dual-sourcing policy has been used, with two manufacturers supplying the bulk of the fleet. But one of the spin-offs of Cleanaway's acquistion of smaller companies is that it has also inherited some "oddball" vehicles. So the Cleanaway fleet now comprises approximately 110 Leylands and 120 Volvos (the two main choices) plus 20 Fodens, 50 Fords and a selection of others, most of which are Bedfords. Each of the 27 depots tends to be either a Leyland or a Volvo depot.
Mike Heywood explained that Leyland chassis are dominant at the lighter end of the weight range and 72 out of the 110 Leylands are 16-ton-gvw Clydesdales; the rest ar Bison or Octopus. Cleanaway has also bought some new Leyland Constructor 6 and 8 chassis but the problem with the Constructor 8 is that its cab is too wide, To get round this problem and so produce a narrow-cabbed eight-wheeler Mike Heywood said that Leyland is working on a second steeraxle conversion for a Constructor 6.
The majority of the multi-axle chassis in the Cleanaway fleet are Volvo — either F7 or F86s. There are just five F6 16-tonners, which make an interesting comparison with the Clydesdales. Articulated outfits are limited to 15; 12 Volvos, a Leyland Roadtrain, a Foden and an ERF. All pull tank semi-trailers and tend to stay c upled up as a l complete outfit. Said Mike Heywood: "We have the artics because we want 32 tons, not because we need articulation."
If maximum permitted gross weights do increase then a few more artics might appear in Cleanaway's light blue livery. "We are not so much interested in 38 tonnes with a two-axle tractive unit but a 6x4 unit at 40 tonnes would be useful. It would give us the extra traction that we need."
With its move into domestic refuse collection surely not far away now, Cleanaway will be looking hard at the lighter end of the chassis market as it prepares to buy its first domestic refuse collection vehicles. Leyland, Dodge and Bedford (not necessarily in that order) are at the front of Mike's mind.
All the maintenance of the vehicles is carried out in Cleanaway's own workshops and this will never change, according to Mike: "Waste disposal is very much a service-oriented business and we need a fast response time when it comes to maintenance. Commercial garages cannot offer this so we use in-house maintenance."
Cleanaway's expansion plans are not fulfilled yet and it has a declared intention to continue to grow by acquiring other companies. The small/medium sized contractor is still common in the waste disposal industry, but Mike Heywood sees this changing in the future. He believes that ultimately there will be two types of waste disposal company.
Firstly, there will be the very large operators such as Cleanaway and its major competitors who have the means to invest in the most modern and most productive equipment — Mike pointed out that a front-loading mobile compactor complete with its suite of 200 containers costs the best part of £100,000.
The other type of waste disposal contractor he expects to survive is the very small business — the man who works from his front room with his wife answering the phone and so who has very low overheads. But for all the small/medium sized contractors in between these twd extremes the future is not so rosy in Mike Heywood's eyes.
In addition to growth by acquistion, Cleanaway is also broadening its base in the waste disposal industry. Not content with bidding for domestic refuse collection contracts the company is working hard at further developing its services for trade and commercial customers — the other sector of the market that, is producing larger tonnages each year.
And domestic skip hire is something else that is receiving Cleanaway's attention. In the Redland Purle days five years ago the company "could not be bothered" with it — it was the bottom end of the waste disposal business and traditionally the territory of the small local contractor.
But, as Mike Heywood pointed out: "The recession has forced us to re-evaluate things and we are now breaking into domestic skip hire as well; some of the companies we have bought are already involved in it. These days you cannot afford the luxury of ignoring anything."