The Meadows started baling cardboard for recycling four years ago, followed by plastic baling, and then transformed its service deck into a streamlined recycling facility with colour-coded bins for tenants. It achieved 60 per cent waste recycling.

But that wasn't enough for The Meadows, so it brought in 'Big Hanna' - Swedish, and £26,000 of accelerated composter. She reduces food waste, including meat and fish, to just 10 per cent of its original volume in six to eight weeks. The compost is used on surrounding landscaped areas. The centre says, when fully operational, Big Hanna will cut the waste it sends to landfill by 90 per cent.

A self-funding delight, she was paid for by The Meadows' cleaning contractor, which is recouping outlay from the savings Big Hanna makes to the cost of emptying the compactor.

So, Big Hanna may have stolen the limelight at this year's SCEPTRE Awards show, but all the entries for the Environmental Initiative of the Year award showed just how important waste management and recycling has become to shopping centre landlords - and their tenants.

Every tonne of rubbish sent to landfill now costs £38 in Landfill Tax (rising to £48 a tonne by 2010), plus transport costs. Yet by separating out and baling up cardboard, for example, in the loads and sizes paper mills will take in, a shopping centre can reduce its landfill costs and get paid anything from £35 to £60 a tonne for the cardboard. The savings and revenue can then go directly towards reducing the service charge to tenants.

Futur Waste, which sponsored the the Environmental Initiative of the Year award, recently put in a compactor and cardboard and plastic balers at the Monks Cross Shopping Park on the edge of York. As a result, Futur is predicting that the centre should make around £7,500 a year from its baled and recycled cardboard and cut the amount it sends to landfill from 950 tonnes a year to 450 tonnes.

pennies for pop bottles

But Tim Price, communications and acquisitions manager at Severnside Recycling, cautions against the view that making money from recycling is easy. "People perceive that waste cardboard, paper, plastics and glass have a value. It goes back to the old days of taking the pop bottle back to the shop and getting a penny. But whether that value can be realised, especially in small quantities, is another thing. From our customers' point of view, waste management is more about the reduction of their costs rather than realising a value.

"If you were a shopping centre producing many tonnes of cardboard a week and you had a baling facility at the back and baled it, it's very likely that you could see a return from your cardboard. But you would need to create mill-sized bales - a tonne or half tonne - transported direct from your centre to the mill in mill-size loads (a full articulated lorry). Then you could expect the market price."

Few organisations - shopping centres or retailers - produce that sort of volume, says Price. As volume drops, waste material is less valuable.

"At the other end of the scale, you can have people taking wheelie bins of waste to a recycling centre. There's a cost involved but it's still cheaper than sending it to landfill."

Not everyone is in a position to get revenue from waste, says Price. "What they can do is make cost savings by not sending their waste to landfill."

Generally, says Price, with the exception of a few major retailers who undertake their own recycling, it is the shopping centre that handles waste management. This produces its own challenges since a centre is trying to coordinate the management of waste streams it doesn't directly produce itself. But it is getting easier to get tenants involved, as waste and recycling moves further up the business agenda. "Take a typical retail organisation. There's plenty of research to suggest that waste can account for as much as 3 per cent of its turnover. That automatically focuses their attention."

The problem is there's no one-size-fits-all answer, says Price. "The best option for a shopping centre to realise the market value for its waste would be a baler at the back and a lorry coming once a week or month to take away a full load. That might look good on paper, but is there room for the baler? Is there room for an articulated lorry to come in? Is there room for storage? If there isn't, you may need to look at smaller containers and more frequent collections, which erode into the waste value of the material."

hitting the roof

The solution, says Steve Burnett, managing director of Compact & Bale, is to get a shopping centre to write out its waste map first, to audit the amount of waste generated on its site, and then look at what waste management practices can be achieved. Compact & Bale supplies compacting and baling machines and is a licensed waste paper trader in its own right.

"We try to help the centre management team put in a sensible system. There's no point putting in a cardboard baler recycling system for a tenant if they don't produce much cardboard," says Burnett. "Equally, the map might identify that a travel agent generates lots of brochures and magazines, so you should have some way of capturing that.

"The aim is to try to understand who generates what, and what kind of tenants need what kind of service. Then make it as easy as possible for them to recycle, to do the right thing."

Once a centre has written its waste map, it needs to write a waste manual describing the system in place. "It could be a straightforward colour-coded system of collecting different types of materials that tenants generate," says Burnett. "Depending on the size of the centre, there may be a cage or bin outside the back of each tenant for cardboard and polythene. Or tenants may be asked to bring their waste to a collection centre in the service yard. Or both.

"At Lakeside in Thurrock, centre management goes round with a tractor to tow bins away to a central baler. But at Chatham Dockside, tenants put their rubbish in bins, then wheel them to the collection centre. The constraint is usually the distance from the recycling point."

What frustrates Burnett most often is basement headroom, or lack of it. Many centres use the basement car parking area to site their waste bins and balers. "The headroom is around 4.2m, enough for an articulated lorry to get in, but not enough for a hook-lift lorry to pick up containers. It's daft; another 800mm would enable waste collection vehicles to work in shopping centre basements."

There are ways round height restrictions, says Burnett. "A couple of manufacturers make special hook-lift lorries where the hook system is lower than normal. But generally it can be very awkward in basements. At some centres the ceiling height is 4.1m - it doesn't matter what you do, you can't get bins out without hitting the roof."

The key to recycling is to put in a system that generates viable loads, says Burnett. "If centres want us to pay them for the rubbish they generate, they have to provide it in a manner in which we can afford to go and collect it. We want compacted, stackable, handleable, storable, loadable, transportable bales we can form into a load and pay them for."

The Kingdom shopping centre in Glenrothes in Scotland is hoping to recycle half its rubbish after appointing Environmental Waste Systems (EWS) to manage its waste. EWS has provided the centre with a portable waste compactor as well as baling machines for cardboard and polythene. The compacting machine automatically notifies EWS when it needs emptying and will cut the number of collections from three to one a week, saving the centre money.

Claire McNeil, business development manager at EWS, claims it's the only waste management company that doesn't charge its customers for collecting their waste. "Because we have so many customers, we can sell on the recycled material and give a rebate back to the customer - less any transport costs, obviously."

Currently EWS doesn't recycle food waste, but is now looking at using anaerobic digestion to allow it to handle food waste. "We want at least one site, probably in the Midlands, were we can use anaerobic digestion to turn food waste into electricity that we can sell back to the grid."

And the future? Tim Price at Severnside says major retailers are now taking waste management and recycling into account when they plan their next store. He knows of one or two developers preparing plans for new shopping centres building waste management and recycling facilities into their designs. Not that any have asked for his advice yet, he says.

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