Four shopping centres - The Mall Arndale, Luton, The Trafford Centre, Manchester, High Chelmer in Chelmsford and Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth - are working on the Envirowise Managed Shopping Centre campaign to improve their environmental performance and have identified potential annual cost savings of around £300,000. Working in partnership with 139 retail outlets, the four centres have identified new ways to reduce, re-use and recycle waste, as well as saving water and energy.

The Mall Arndale is currently rolling out a range of centre-wide recycling measures with the aim of reducing the costs of waste disposal. Retailers are being urged to segregate plastic, cardboard and paper waste to maximise opportunities to recycle materials and significantly minimise the amount of waste going to landfill. Through these measures, it is estimated that resource efficiency savings of just over £38,000 could be made.

Brian McFarland, centre manager at the Luton centre, says: "The biggest issue is plastic. We have already improved our cardboard recycling so now we're separating plastics. A glass skip is also having moderate success."

Chris Hodgson, Managed Shopping Centre project manager for Envirowise, says: "These four shopping centres are leading the way in environmental responsibility and we're delighted with the positive response from the retailers involved. This approach should act as a blueprint for management best practice at other shopping centres wanting to make similar savings in the future."

Lakeside shopping centre was tasked two years ago with kick-starting a major push on recycling in order to achieve Capital Shopping Centre's desired corporate responsibilities.

Nick Jewitt of GBM Services was assigned the task and he turned to Compact & Bale for help and advice. "Their recommendations for improvement are always based on good advice and not with an eye for financial gain," he says. "They will even recommend other suppliers or products if that's what's right for us."

The first thing Lakeside did was to install the Durapac baling presses from Compact & Bale so that they could segregate and present their waste materials for recycling. Two vertical mill-size Durapac CB-52 balers were introduced to deal with the tenants' waste films as well as a continuous feed Durapac CB-65 to process large volumes of loose cardboard into 700kg bales.

GMB now recycles paper, magazines, film, garment wrap, metals, cages, wood, cardboard and batteries, and the figures are impressive: from zero recycling two years ago, the centre achieved a 52 per cent recycling rate during the final quarter of 2005. In addition the site is much cleaner and clearer, waste materials are stacked and stored in bales and the whole work environment has been improved.

Meadowhall's recycling initiative is continuing to go from strength to strength, with the introduction in December of its own on-site recycling facility.

Although it has only been open a short space of time, the facility has smashed all initial targets, recycling almost 95 per cent of all general centre waste, up from 65 per cent previously. The recycling facility, known as the Resource Recovery Centre, is a first within the shopping centre industry and many other companies up and down the country are now using it as a model for their own businesses.

The system works on a conveyor belt system so that all materials that are put into the general waste bins are sorted through and segregated into materials that can and can't be recycled. The conveyor belt system is designed to allow up to nine people at a time to sort through the waste with each worker picking out one recyclable material each and putting it into the correct recycle bin. At the end of the cycle the bin goes back to the beginning to be sorted again in case anything was missed the first time round.

Environment and audit manager Mark Allison says: "Plans are in place to extend our recycling initiatives even further. For example, we're currently looking at a scheme to recycle oil from the centre's restaurants, an on-site waste-to-energy scheme and chipping wood to use for playground bark or weed suppressing mulch."

Meadowhall can now proudly boast that it is at zero landfill. The initial £34,000 outlay for the facility has been more than cost-effective, achieving an investment return of £241,000.

As a result of all its innovative work on recycling initiatives, Meadowhall came in at number five in the Yorkshire and Humber Environmental Index this year. The centre also achieved the highest environmental score within the retail sector.

Contacts

Envirowise: http://www.envirowise.gov.uk

Compact & Bale: 01732 852244

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