Environmental Reports

Your Carbon Footprint

B&M Waste Services has developed an Environmental Report program in conjunction with our software provider. We are now able to produce much more accurate Environmental Reports, where we factor in where your site is, what your service is and what recycling/recovery facility the waste is taken to daily. It means that on any given day, the software is able to analyse how many bins were emptied, where the waste was taken and how it was processed.

We have also teamed up with Carbon Footprint Ltd to illustrate the effect of diverting waste away from landfill has on reducing carbon emissions for our customers. When waste is deposited in a landfill site, it breaks down and emits carbon. By recycling the material, we reduce the amount of carbon we emit into the environment. In the report this is expressed as an equivalent number of trees that would need to be planted to offset the emissions had it gone to landfill, or the number of car miles (in a 2.0 litre diesel) saved by diverting a particular waste stream from landfill.

We carefully plan all of our routes to maximise efficiency, whilst considering the carbon impact. B&M Waste Services is continually seeking to work with the best local recycling partners to minimise our customers’ impact on the environment. All of the waste that we collect will be taken to a processing facility, and in some cases, where the waste type and location permits, will be taken to a Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) processing facility.

Waste Streams

 We have simplified the waste streams into four categories:

• Site segregated glass – i.e. separate glass bin collections
• Site segregated recyclables – this includes card and plastic bins and wood skips
• Non-segregated recyclates – this is the amount recycled by a Materials Recycling Facility (MRF)
• Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) – this is the amount of waste sent to RDF Production Facilities
• Organic (Food waste)

Each waste stream has its own bulk density i.e. how heavy the bin is per cubic metre, for example glass has a bulk density of 333kg per cubic metre, whereas recyclables such as card and plastic are much lighter at only 25kg per cubic metre. These figures are shown on the bottom of the detailed reports.

The total collection weight is then calculated as below:

Total Collection Weight =  number of bins emptied x volume of bin  x bulk density of waste stream

The report then looks at the route that the bin was collected, and the recycling/recovery facility that the waste is taken to that day. Each of these recycling facilities have provided us with a recycling percentage in writing. For those bins collected by a sub-contractor we have been given a recycling percentage in writing. These percentages are entered onto the system and the program applies them to each waste stream appropriately. The program then takes the recycled weight and applies a conversion factor provided by Carbon Footprint Ltd to produce the carbon emissions figure.