Redrow Homes: Yorkshire Division

Regional Contract

Redrow Homes is one of the UK’s leading residential property developers with responsibility for a wide range of housing developments, from large greenfield sites to complex brownfield regeneration schemes. Redrow operates across much of the UK with 13 separate divisions working across England and Wales. Redrow Homes Yorkshire entered into contract with Reconomy in 2008 following the business acquisition of Yorkshire Waste Management, who had previously held the contract since 2004. Reconomy took over principle responsibility for the management of all house building and construction waste, together with septic tank emptying and hazardous waste disposal, across all of Redrow Homes Yorkshire’s house building projects. Averaging approximately 10 live sites each year, the contract remains active to this day.

Waste minimisation

In addition to disposal, Reconomy was tasked with helping to minimise the amount of on-site waste created by Redrow Homes Yorkshire during the various stages of the house building process. From day one of the contract, this has been managed by Reconomy’s team of regionally-based Site Liaison Officers (SLOs). Effectively acting as the Site Manager’s eyes and ears for all matters relating to waste, during each site visit SLOs follow a 10 step process in order to identify any areas where waste minimisation, recycling and reuse can be improved.

For Redrow Homes Yorkshire, this typically involved checking that waste streams were all being properly segregated and correctly loaded into skips and containers at each site’s waste management compound. Additionally, the SLO would actively seek out any waste caused by on-site damage, attempt to identify the cause – for example poor storage or overordering – and make recommendations in order to design out the problem. In support of this, all Redrow Homes Yorkshire site managers were given access to the Reconomy Portal in order to have full visibility of their waste data – both at site level and across the entire region. This allowed sites with higher waste spend to be prioritised by SLOs in order to identify quick wins for waste minimisation.

Local support

A key aspect of Reconomy’s service that was valued by Redrow Homes Yorkshire from the outset was the means to provide a local point of contact. Because Reconomy’s SLOs are all regionally based, they can be available to visit a site at short notice in the event of a problem or a spike in waste costs. This proved invaluable on one particular site when it became apparent that pallets were being irregularly stacked in timber skips, meaning the skips could not be fully utilised and heightening the frequency of their exchange. In partnership with the SLO a targeted awareness drive was put in place in order to raise site-level knowledge of an existing agreement between Redrow Homes and Scott ELM, whereby all undamaged pallets could be removed and recycled free of charge. Though the agreement with Scott ELM removed the need for pallets to be placed in skips, it still presented an invaluable opportunity for the Reconomy SLO to carry out toolbox talks with on-site personnel in order to show them how to correctly load similarly bulky waste streams, such as plasterboard. This helped to ensure skips were leaving the site correctly loaded to capacity, improving the efficiency of exchanges.

Achieving results

Since 2008 Reconomy has supported Redrow Homes Yorkshire on over 20 separate house building projects across the county, managing approximately 6,000 tonnes of waste per year. Thanks to good on-site segregation and improved skip utilisation, over 90% of this waste has been consistently diverted away from landfill each year. The partnership aims to continue achieving positive results in the future, delivering year-on-year improvements in the amount of waste diverted away from landfill.