It’s usually just the most dedicated recycler that takes an interest in neighbours’ recycling bins, but something is happening in Northern Ireland that has got people in a bin-watching frenzy.

Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses syndrome has taken residents of the picturesque town of Newtownabbey by force, and, in something of a coup for the council, the authority is actually having to reassure residents that they could soon be provided with the shiny new recycling system that has been literally rolled out to some of their neighbours.

It’s all thanks to a recycling trial worked up by Northern Irish social enterprise Bryson Recycling to help local authorities meet the EC’s requirements for member states to have in place separate collections of paper, plastic, metal and glass by 1 January 2015.

Trial background

According to Eric Randall, Director of Bryson Recycling, the system was first proposed in 2007, after findings from the waste management company’s surveys found that, amongst other things, householders were looking for easily-portable recycling boxes with larger capacity (Newtownabbey’s standard recycling boxes currently hold 55 litres each) that had lids that didn’t blow off in Northern Ireland’s famous winds.

As such, Randall approached container manufacturer Straight plc, asking the company to design something that would help to meet householders’ and collectors’ needs. It came up with a design for a two-box stacking system on wheels that was lightweight enough to be wheeled to the kerbside but strong enough to withstand the elements.

Once a design was completed, Bryson Recycling approached Newtownabbey Borough Council (NBC) – with which it had a waste contract – about implementing the idea, but it wasn’t until much later that a trial was rolled out. Randall explains: “We had the bin design, but no manufacturer is going to begin producing something in bulk until it has a customer, and no customer is going to buy into a system that is untried and untested.” Eventually, the stalemate was broken when the Welsh Government gave Conwy County Borough Council a Collaborative Change Programme grant to improve its recycling. Conwy told Straight it would invest in its new container system, but only if it was for three boxes, rather than two. Straight agreed with the approach and the council began trialling the 150-litre system – which it calls ‘TroliBocs’ – which in turn led Bryson to convince NBC to do the same.

Lisa Mayne, Recycling Manager at NBC, says that the authority was on board with the system as soon as it saw it was “something that would address householders’ issues, but also allowed [the council] to continue source-separate collections”.

She explains: “We knew that there were (and still are) huge issues surrounding material quality, and we wanted to keep guaranteeing recyclate quality but also providing a service that the public wanted as well. This system could provide both of those for us, so the council were very, very behind it.”

How the system works

In May 2013, NBC used a combination of waste management budgets and grants from the Department of the Environment to roll out the stackable bin system, which Bryson markets as the Wheelie Box (“as we’re trying to get across that it has the benefits of a wheelie bin but also has the benefits of boxes, which keep material separate”) to 4,000 households, alongside smaller residual waste bins (180 litres, down from 240 litres). Residual and organic waste is collected fortnightly, with the Wheelie Box collected once a week.

The wheelie box comprises: a 40-litre box with a blue lid for paper and fringe materials (such as tools, textiles, batteries, foil and hand tools); a 55-litre box with a red flap for cans, aerosols, cartons and plastics; and a 55-litre box with a green flap for glass bottles and jars, as well as cardboard.

Despite being larger in size (coming up to around hip height when stacked), and being fitted with a trolley system, the Wheelie Box is surprisingly lightweight and easy-to-use, a feature that the collection operatives have particularly enjoyed.

One operative tells me: “I really like the new system – it certainly saves on back pain! With the boxes in the collection rounds, you were always bending down and standing up with heavy loads, but with this, we just roll it to the truck, put the materials in the compartments and then roll it back to the house. It’s easy.”

Once rolled to the council’s new Romaquip Kerb-Sort vehicles, the fringe materials are placed in one section, paper in another, and the entire contents of the red box decanted into one, large compartment (for separation at Bryson’s materials recovery facility – on a line that only contains like material, i.e. no glass or paper), while glass and cardboard are sorted into the two largest apertures of the truck.

Householder acceptance

The trials have been a success all round, Randall tells me, adding that in the first few months, the council was reporting higher recycling and participation rates. He says: “We started the process by outlining what we wanted to achieve, and we set some pretty high benchmarks: it had to be lowest cost, best performance recycling (i.e. high-quality and high-quantity recycling), and have [a] high public level of acceptance. Through the trial, we pretty much managed to achieve all those things. We pushed the amount of recycling up by 30 per cent in Newtownabbey [around 0.75 kilogrammes per household per week (or 36.4 kg a year)] and saw a 20 per cent drop in the amount of residual waste arisings too. Participation rates went up by about 15 per cent, too.”

Mayne adds that the trial was the “perfect time” to push waste minimisation, stating: “You can’t just reduce bin capacity for no reason, so we were reducing waste bin sizes but also introducing higher capacity for recyclates through the Wheelie Box system at the same time – so people felt like they were getting something in return.”

What’s more, it’s not only participation and recycling rates that have increased, but also public acceptability. A few weeks into the trials, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) sent out a postal survey to every householder that took part in the collection rounds to gauge the system’s progress. More than 42 per cent of participants in Newtownabbey responded, with a massive 91 per cent of respondents saying they preferred the Wheelie Box system to their old system, and 86 per cent saying they found it easier to separate out their recyclables. (A smaller trial of 850 households in Castlereagh Borough Council saw similar levels of acceptance, but as householders continued to have fortnightly collections of residual waste in 240-litre wheelie bins, the recycling rate increased by just 10 per cent, which didn’t justify the cost of the new boxes, which require an initial investment of about £39 per household.)

“The rate of increase and amount recycled was pretty close to what we predicted. But the level of acceptance and the public’s enthusiasm completely blew us away”, Randall admits. “We hadn’t expected it to be as vehemently expressed as it was. People absolutely fell for it.”

Indeed, Mayne tells me that she’s even had residents call up the council to find out why they haven’t got the new, wheeled recycling bins, incensed that householders in neighbouring streets had them and they didn’t.

It all sounded a little too good to be true, so wanting to find out for myself what householders thought of the Wheelie Box, I took a walk around some of the trial areas of Newtownabbey. I found – much as the survey outlined – that residents were not only using the system, but also enjoying using it.

“It’s much, much better than the old box system”, one householder told me. “It’s easy, with the wheels, to just roll it out to the road on collection day, and it’s more fun too. My kids enjoy it.”

Two of the three householders I spoke to said they keep their Wheelie Box outside, with the boxes still stacked up, and simply go outside whenever they need to recycle anything. The third said he unstacks his and brings the boxes inside. Interestingly, all three householders said that the box they use least often is the top box (for paper and fringe materials) and suggested that it could be made smaller – and the middle box (for cans, cartons and plastics), bigger. Randall tells me, however, that while paper arisings have dropped from around 55 per cent of household waste (by weight) to 37 per cent in recent years, it is still on average the heaviest material collected in terms of weight per household. (But when I follow the collection round, during a mini-heatwave in July, it’s the cardboard ice cream and burger boxes that are taking up the most space!)

The system has been such a success that NBC hopes to roll it out across all its 36,000 households over the next few years, 4,000 households at a time. Mayne explains: “We found that the amount of householders that trialled the system was the right amount to manage for everybody. It gave us time to deal with any kinks, and the resources could deal with everything quickly. We were also able to manage the number of calls coming in – which we might not have done if it were rolled out across the entire council at the same time.”

As with the trial run, households will receive a leaflet about the changes, followed up by household visits before the new Wheelie Boxes are delivered (with more detailed information), and the waste bins replaced. The council has said it will contact households that need more capacity (such as those with larger families or medical conditions) before the changes take place to make sure they aren’t “disadvantaged”.

Advice to other councils

Asked if the Wheelie Box system could be used by other councils, Randall is measured in his reply: “In the vast majority of areas this model should work. I think the system may prove most difficult to justify in a very high population turnover, low-income, poor-performing area – student areas for example, where turnover is annual and interest may be elsewhere. It will be most effective where you have quite a poor recycling system to start with and there are lots of gains to be made. If you introduce the model in these circumstances the council is going to save tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands per year even. “In those situations, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t see savings of around £7 or £8 per household per year.”

He concludes: “It’s such a compelling case once you’ve proved that it works in your area. You can achieve the magic north-of-50-per-cent recycling rates, you can prove that you’ve got good-quality recyclate coming out, the public love it, and it’s cost effective. What isn’t there to like about it?”

Mayne is cautious in offering advice, but says: “The main thing is about evolving the current system that’s there, listening to what your customers want, making it as easy as possible for people to recycle and reduce waste to landfill.

“To get people who have always co-mingled to change is hard, but European legislation is going to push it down this way, and a system like this could help councils be compliant. This Wheelie Box system certainly shows that councils can use this easy system and be TEEP [technically, environmentally or economically practicable] compliant across a range of different household types, housing density, and demographics. It’s being done here.”