LAWR

C&I WASTE Jones OBE takes a different approach and compared the evolution of C&I waste issues to the role of information technology in revolutionising services provision to market segments that were once thought impenetrable to providers, where he says strong brands in retail find themselves under threat as their customer base is now able to use IT themselves to buy direct from suppliers and have home deliveries which they control rather than the retail intermediaries. Speaking about historical and future trends, Jones says: "Phase one saw the emergence of national scale operators able to invest in sophisticated IT systems with economies of scale and data systems able to model profitability based on route efficiencies and densities in the early 1990's. "Phase two saw Biffa as the first to be able to develop one stop shop service packages for multi-site waste producers of the early nineties in retailing, brewing, leisure, hotels and restaurants. Flat rate pricing for the same service from Plymouth to Aberdeen consolidated hundreds of different C&I pricing structures once administered and negotiated on a shop by shop basis with no coherent structure." He continues to say that phase three Effective and reliable H2S removal with ERG Unique biological scrubbing system to clean AD derived biogas www.ergapc.co.uk has emerged in the last three years whereby the customer is realising that national type large scale contracts need not be 100% in the hands of a single brand supplier. Intermediaries with the appropriate IT, but with no sites or trucks, can cherry pick the best performing collection service providers by postcode and then offer C&I waste producers an efficient and effective service package in segregation, recycling , remanufacture, rebundling them as a single service offering to multi-site waste producers. Jones also proclaims that established operators with trucks and 'physical' assets such as depots and sites have to concentrate on route density and consolidate their route density advantages to ensure they are attractive to the non-asset base consolidators. He adds: "The same principles are driving Royal Mail to service online ordering market by us (as consumers) in their vans instead of container trucks delivering to Argos, Comet or Tesco stores. We can see this manifesting for C&I waste in Bath and other cities with the appropriate population density, tonnage of waste or disposal challenges (or combination of all three)." So, in essence, for the unknowns to become known, Jones concludes that issues around C&I streams will be resolved as the service consolidators with a very low physical asset base remorselessly drive efficiencies of scale and service quality postcode by postcode underpinned by efficient online IT and data management investment. ERG Air Pollution Control 01403 221000 info@ergapc.co.uk January 2014 Local Authority Waste & Recycling 11

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