LAWR

PROFILE Software pioneer AMCS Group is a world giant in the provision of software and vehicle technology to the waste and recycling industry. It has recently secured £19m funding to support its growth plans and cre- ate 20 new jobs in the UK. Liz Gyekye catches up with the firm's chief executive and cofounder Jimmy Martin to find out more. Since 2003 Martin has successfully grown and developed the company from a start- up in Limerick, Ireland to world leading environmental soft- ware company with operations in Ireland, UK, Sweden, Norway, France and the USA. Over the past decade, Jimmy has been responsible for many roles within the company ranging from technology development to operations and sales as well as leading two highly successful funding dialogues. So what are his plans? How are you making route optimisation technology to make waste collection rounds more efficient in the sector? The main goal is to gather data about what is happening on the rounds and making use of this data to make intel- ligent decisions. This in turn can help to change behav- iour of the customers or be used to change the size of the trucks to make them more efficient, or even the fre- quency of how you collect the bins. The data helps to create a direct line of communication with the customer which can also be used to help tell them how well they are performing at recy- cling. For instance, on a street level, the data could be used to inform a street that they are performing well at recycling or badly. If they are performing badly then you could inform the customer of their recycling level and say 'did you know you could recycle this? Or this goes in this bin?' This means that you can continuously monitor performance of the round and analyse changes in trends. What trends are you noticing in the sector? I have noticed in Ireland there is huge interaction with the customer. In the UK the customer as viewed as just a 'house- holder' – somebody to provide a service to rather than a customer you commu- nicate with on a regular basis. The level of interaction seems to be quite low here compared to other countries. Trends are demographic dependent. In the US, you have a pattern of high recycling rates in the West Coast, with some states reaching up to 70% [San Francisco]. However, in other parts of the US recycling can be quite poor. Sweden has recycling rates of 50% and only 1% of waste goes to landfill with 49% been converted to energy. Ireland's recycling has increased sig- nificantly over the last number of years with to an average of 40% with some regions achieving close to 50%, also in Ireland there is big trend toward RDF (refuse derived fuel) with over 20% expected to be exported as RDF in 2014 and another 20% shall be collected as organic waste and converted to energy or compost. France is starting to think differently and has started to legislate the polluter pays principle. In 2014 over 7% of houses where charged directly for waste collection and it is expected that all houses shall be charged directly for waste service by 2020. In the US and Sweden, they tend to implement high-level service agree- ments with the contractor collecting the materials. So, a typical waste manage- ment contract over 5-10 years tends to be a lot more dynamic. This means that they tend to use data to help define the performance of the contractor collect- ing waste and recycling and they are paid based on this performance using data from on vehicle systems such as RFID and on board computer technology. Elsewhere, we have found that recy- cling messages delivered in schools helps with better performance. If kids are tar- geted at schools they tend to educate their parents and people they live with to recycle more. Where do you see the next 10 years going? Waste is also being seen as a resource across the board. People realise that there is value in materials. Big players now see themselves as resource companies as opposed to waste ones. We see this hap- pening in different sectors of the waste industry including: composting, waste- to-energy, plastics and landfill-to-gas. More needs to be done to get munici- pal recycling rates up. In the commer- cial sector economics has helped this to happen, especially when the landfill tax increased to around £60-£70 per tonne around two years ago. In the next ten years it will become uneconomical and legislatively prohibi- tive to open new landfills in western Europe so it is imperative that we all see waste for what it truly is - a resource that we prevent from been wasted in the first place. S May 2014 Local Authority Waste & Recycling 7 AMCS Group CEO Jimmy Martin

• Cover