Journey to Three Weekly Collections Reaches Go Live
On 9 June 2025, Three Weekly Refuse & Weekly Recycling and Food Waste collections will Go Live across the North Somerset to make recycling easier and reduce waste. North Somerset Environment Company, working together with North Somerset Council, have been working tirelessly to ensure that the service change will be a success and help residents across North Somerset to recycle more.
In 2024, North Somerset Council conducted an extensive public consultation to glean an understanding of the resident’s needs, wants and habits for recycling and waste management. The findings of this outline that Three Weekly Refuse collections for North Somerset would be a feasible option, following in the footsteps of other Local Authorities across the UK who have made this change over the last decade.
Our NSEC team, alongside our colleagues at North Somerset Council, began designing the new service in the second half of 2024. Our Project Manager, Shane Young, working with our Senior Supervisor, Daniel Cooper, spent many weeks planning each individual route for the service change. Their blend of industry, project and district knowledge enabled them to create the best possible routes which would make this service change successful.
Throughout the four distinct drafting phases, our project team has fully engaged with our operational workforce to build in their knowledge and expertise into the designs to blend the best of our data with the best ‘on the ground’ operational knowledge giving us a very strong service design, designed by ‘one team with one goal’. Various media were deployed to make this possible, as presented by Shane and Daniel at the 2024 Routeware User Group. These media provided a fantastic opportunity to get the collection crew feedback and their overall thoughts on the service change. Off the back of these discussions, new drafts would be created to factor in some of the feedback crews provided until we had a complete service change routes which all the operational team were happy with.
This project has also seen the district wide roll out of our new Red Sacks for the purpose of recycling plastic packaging and household metal products such as drink cans and food tins. We ran trials of these in some of the areas of our district, our Recycling Advisor, Alice McWatters, visited those residents to gather feedback and data which ultimately informed the roll out of over 80,000 sacks across North Somerset. Our operational team, headed up by Jamie Cox, Daniel Cooper and Bruce Grime planed and executed these deliveries across a 7-week period.
In addition to the red sacks, our new service will also see the first full contract wide roll out of soft plastic collections at kerbside, ensuring that North Somerset is ready for the Simpler Recycling regulations and enabling our residents to recycle as much as possible.
This project has also seen a full rejuvenation of our fleet with the replacement of the aged Romaquips presenting an opportunity to design them for the future, featuring an innovative Soft Plastic compartment with mechanical compaction in addition to adapting the sizes of the other compartments to accommodate additional material volume. They also include additional safety features factoring in the safe collection and segregation on the vehicles of batteries, vapes and electricals. As well as the physical and mechanical innovations and adjustments, we’ve also taken the opportunity to refresh the liveries with a unique new design to give a new look to our new service.
Our partnership with Romaquip has been strong throughout the design and build process. Early in 2025, our Managing Director, Stuart Jellings, Fleet Manager, Simon Martin, Project Manager, Shane Young and Senior Supervisor, Daniel Cooper, were hosted by Romaquip at their factory to witness the first of our new vehicles rolling off of the production line. This then carried through back at our Westlands Depot where, upon the arrival of that first new Romaquip, we hosted a Display Day to enable all of our crews and colleagues across the business could see the new lorry for the first time, receive an overview of the new CMS Supatrak telematics being installed on the new fleet, and of course, some tasty BBQ food was provided for all to enjoy on the day.
After an extensive and detailed review of our telematics, camera and safety hardware provision on our vehicles, we selected CMS Supatrak as our provider being installed on all of our collection vehicles. This will further encourage our discussions around driving safely and encouraging good driving behaviour across our workforce which will yield long term benefits.
