London Wider Waste Strategy - London - Greater London Authority

The findings are presented below. We have split our analysis into separate sections on waste
collection, waste disposal, trends and management systems. Responses have been aggregated
or otherwise presented in a manner to ensure confidentiality.
Waste Collection
A total of 18 out of 33 authorities responded to the questionnaires on waste collection. This
comprised 11 of the 21 waste collection authorities (WCAs) and seven of the 12 unitary
authorities (UAs) responded to the questionnaire.
The first group of questions asked about the collection of commercial and industrial waste.
DSOs were the preferred approach, with 11 of the 18 respondents using DSOs to collect wastes.
However, DSOs were more highly favoured in our returns by WCAs (six out of 11 replies) than
by UAs (two out of seven replies). Instead, the UAs preference was to use private waste
companies (five out of seven replies) compared to the WCAs (three out of eleven replies). Of
the remaining WCAs, one had externalised the collection (i.e. sold it to a private company) and
one had set up a joint venture.
Those authorities that used an external company to collect commercial and industrial waste
were asked to name the company. This applied to five UAs and three WCAs. The majority (six
out of eight) of the authorities used private companies to collect commercial wastes only, whilst
the remaining two (both UAs) used them to collect both commercial and industrial. Of our
sample returns, all but one of the authorities to whom this question applied used a single
company; the reaming authority (a WCA) used two different companies, but interestingly both
were for commercial wastes only.
Of the nine private waste contracts for waste collection in our sample returns, three were let to
Cleanaway and three to Onyx, two to MRS Environmental Services and one to BIFFA. Our
sample returns are not really sufficient to identify whether some companies are favoured more
than others, although our returns suggest that there was no clear favourite for the WCAs with
the each of the four contracts being let to a different company. For the UAs, two of the
contracts were to Cleanaway and two to Onyx, with one to MRS.
Of the nine private waste contracts, our sample returns suggests that the UAs had longer term
contracts in place as illustrated in Table E2. The longest term contract in our sample was for
the one WCA that operated a joint venture. The renewal date for this contract is 2015.
Table E2: Date of Renewal for Private Waste Collection Contracts
Date of Contract Renewal WCA UA Total
2004 3 - 3
2005 1 1 2
2006 - - -
2007 - 1 1
2008 - 1 1
2009 - - -
2010 - 2 2
Totals 4 5 9
164