As with most industries, the last decade has seen the waste and recycling sector becoming increasingly reliant on, and indeed guided by, information technology. This doesn’t just include the Internet – now such a part of all our lives that day-to-day existence is almost inconceivable without it – but the software packages that have revolutionised the lot of the average recycling officer.

“During the last 10 years, IT has played a major part in the growth of the industry”, insists Richard Bowers, Managing Director of Isys Interactive Systems, a Derby-based firm that specialises in providing software packages to the recycling and waste sector. “In fact it’s unthinkable it could have experienced that growth without IT.” The software that has been developed by firms like Isys has enabled waste managers to see the big picture for the first time, develop more coherent waste strategies and meet the targets that have been imposed upon them. Software and service improvements have very much gone hand in hand.

This has been the case in both the public and private sector. The most significant piece of software that has transformed local authorities’ waste strategies is a package called the Waste and Resources Assessment Tool for the Environment (WRATE). Developed over a four-year period by Golder Associates for the Environment Agency, WRATE is a life cycle model that allows its users to take into account the waste management system in its entirety. For the first time, local councils and waste operators can factor not only the bins, but also the oil that made the bins.

WRATE Project Director David Hall takes up the story: “Once the Landfill Directive came in there was a clear need to have a means of allowing waste managers to understand the full environmental impact of their selected strategy. They decided to develop something that was a) a bit more up to date and b) contained more than just incinerators and landfill. The Environment Agency wanted a piece of software that contained all of those new advanced waste treatment technologies – pyrolysis, combined heat and power plants. You name it, they wanted it.”

WRATE has been sold to a dozen local authorities and over 30 environmental consultancies and Hall suggests it may yet play a role in reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions from waste. “We now have a way of working out what they are. By using WRATE it is very easy to change a waste management system from one that is a net greenhouse gas emitter to a net offsetter of greenhouse gases, replacing the use of oil, coal and gas with renewable energy.”

Newcastle City Council was one of the local authorities that used Version 1.0 of WRATE, as Waste and Recycling Contracts and Strategy Manager Terry Harnan explains: “We acquired it to advise us on the outcome of our strategic environmental assessment. It was certainly very detailed and comprehensive and looked very good when you put in a report. It helped in the reports that you took to various committees – as an independent voice of analysis it worked well and carried them through the process.

“The downsides were that I found it a bit cumbersome, but then I am not the most PC-literate person in the world.”

For Hall, the most important thing about developing the actual software is making it relevant to those who are going to use it. “It’s important that people can understand it with a very small amount of training. It needs to be intuitive, it needs to be robust, it needs to not crash too often and if it does it needs to save all the data.”

At the same time as the Environment Agency was developing WRATE, WRAP was launching a piece of software called the Kerbside Analysis Tool (KAT), which, as the name suggests, allows users to scrutinise the variables within kerbside collections – different container types, levels of household participation and material capture. The first version of KAT emerged in 2004 and since then it has been an invaluable resource for local authorities looking to predict costs and improve their recycling service.

However, being an Excel spreadsheet tool, even KAT appears somewhat clunky compared to the sort of sophisticated packages that are increasingly coming onto the market. Qurius is a Lancashire-based firm that specialises in providing bespoke software packages, such as Enwis, which they describe as a ‘total solution for the waste management and recycling industry’.

“Essentially it deals with the movement of the trucks, the movement of the waste material, the personnel and the contract side – the billing and the stock management side of recycling”, says Qurius Director of Environment Jason Fazackerley. “We still have a few customers who have landfill sites but over the years our customers have focused much more on recycling and moving those recycled materials around.”

Enwis, Fazackerley explains, analyses all these variables, allowing its users to make efficiencies, and thus savings, within their system. “In terms of results, we’ve had our clients say to us that Enwis has allowed them to reduce their operating
costs in the region of 10-20 per cent, which is not insignificant.”

Meanwhile Richard Bowers’ Isys supplies software packages that analyse four main aspects of the waste picture: GateHOUSE (a landfill and materials recycling package), Skipman (fleet and container scheduling), Mediwaste (clinical waste tracking) and SWOPS (hazardous waste tracking). “All are data collection systems that allow the company to pick up multiple jobs through our system and track and trace the paperwork trail. They manage the collection data at the disposal point as well as the billing and the invoicing for all the companies.”

As the cost of implementation has come down the use of these sorts of packages has expanded throughout the sector. “I think the smaller end of the waste and recycling industry has now come around to looking at IT a bit more seriously”, Bowers suggests. “The benefits are there in a quicker speed of transaction and a greater clarity in the data that is provided. There has been a huge reduction in the amount of paperwork.”

But what of the future? Everyone we spoke to in compiling this feature agreed that the next generation of recycling software will in all likelihood be web-based, enhancing the potential for work from home or remote locations. But perhaps the most interesting developments lie in the potential within recycling software to improve customer relations, both in the private and public sectors. Jason Fazackerley says: “The technology will soon be there so that when a customer rings up you can tell him when his bin was last collected, when it will be collected, even where the vehicle is and its estimated time of arrival.

“Or maybe a company will want evidence of what has happened to their material. We’ve got clients now who want to know exactly what their carbon footprint is. Soon the companies that are managing recycling for those organisations will be able to calculate their carbon footprint from data not just from the vehicle that does their recycling but also the mill that processes that material. That level of tracking will become ever more important.”

It is, he maintains, “very exciting”. Boot up and strap yourself in.