Recycling Diaries...

01 December, 2007

The end of the year at SB Waste in Wolverhampton finds Andrew Hewitt in reflective mood and the company’s new recycling plant still not operational. In his latest Recycling Diaries installment he takes time to ponder the causes of the project delay and recaps on what readers considering taking the same route can learn from the project’s more challenging moments.

Well! I can’t hide it, the photographs speak for themselves. We are not up and running yet. Yes, I know I said last issue we would be but the reality is that we’re still another two weeks away from being fully operational – maybe three if the weather gets any worse.

How could this be? I hear you ask. Well, being as I can’t fill this issue with stories of how fantasic everything is I thought I’d sit down and try to get to grips with why we are where we are. That way we can all learn.

A number of people have called over the past few days asking if we’re running, wanting to come and see what we’ve done. When we confess to being behind the general reaction is: “Oh well so&so’s plant was eight weeks late. I heard tell of a plant that’s 14 weeks late and still not running”.

Call me a perfectionist but this doesn’t ease my conscience or make me feel any better. It’s like the stock phrase in the sales meeting when the orders aren’t coming in:

“Everybody’s a bit quiet this month”. That doesn’t cut it when the buck stops with you.
Firstly there were two major changes on the plant that were made fairly late in the day and I’m afraid to say made by me.

On the main conveyor carrying the oversize material to the airknife and the picking stations I added an extra 2metres. It shouldn’t have been that much of a problem but for some reason the steel sections we needed were very hard to get hold of. And we changed the design of the concrete plinth that the screen sits on.

The concrete was done for financial reasons as it changed an exceptionally expensive piece of civil engineering into merely an expensive one. But it involved designing and manufacturing a new frame for the screen.

We ended up saving around £15,000. The extra length of the conveyor gave us another 2metres operating space between the picking stations and the fines line and now everything is in place it easy to see how benefitial this will be.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, so sitting at my nice warm desk it’s been quite easy to analyse things and say we should have done this differently or we shouldn’t have done that. The difficult thing is to prevent them happening in the future.

For me, the thing that really stands out is the running of the civil engineering side and the mechanical installation at the same time. This creates its own set of problems. The downside is that the alternative creates just as many problems.

SB is an exceptionally busy waste company. The old Viper plant we took out did a job and a percentage of the waste was recycled. In a perfect world we should have switched the Viper plant off three weeks before the steelwork arrived and let the civil engineers get in and build what we needed, get their side finished and get them out of the way.

I’m sure this would have greatly reduced the time for the mechanical installation. But the reality is that the yard we are using would have been closed for exactly the same period of time so there was nothing to gain by going this route.

When you look at other areas that have been time consuming, it’s easy to find an alternative that would have speeded things up, but it’s even easier to let the costs run away with themselves.

The picking station is a classic example. From the day we decided to go for the twin belts, heavy & light, running side by side (see pictures left), the building covering them was going to be a problem, mainly because it was an odd shape.

We could have gone for a prefabricated building arriving on the back of a lorry. Two days with the crane and it’s up and finished. But the cost was unbelievable. Without exaggeration you could have bought a terraced house in Wolverhampton for what this would have cost. So we are fabricating a building using our own staff.

The bays under the picking station, starscreen and dense-out are another area where the pros and cons had to be carefully considered.

Personally I would always go for concrete walls. I think concrete looks better than steel plate, it doesn’t get damaged as badly by the loading shovel bucket and the scratches and scrapes don’t go rusty after a few months. If you can get the civil work done early, as previously mentioned, it’s quick and easy to drop the picking station on.

However, one of the major considerations we have built into this plant is that SB will outgrow the yard long before the end of the working life of the plant. So, rather than concrete everything in we are using steel plates for the walls.

This work is proving very time consuming. I would love to see us move to a bigger yard in five years’ time and build an even bigger plant there but we’ll have to wait and see.

The decking was another headache. The electricians couldn’t – and wouldn’t – start until we had all the walkways in place and secure. All solid health and safety sense. But for some reason our supplier for the decking plates had great difficulty is getting everything to us on time. So the electricians were late starting. However they really have pulled out all the stops and we are catching up fast on the electrical installation.

As I do the daily rounds – not quite daily these days as I’m now busy looking for something to do next year – checking what’s been delivered and what’s being installed, it’s not hard to see how we could have got the plant up in a shorter time. And it’s very easy to see how we could have spent a lot more money doing it.

It’s not until we were without the old plant that we realised how much work it got through. The reduced space in the yard means that we don't even have enough room to do much of a manual sort on the floor.

Everything is tipped, quickly sorted through for the best bits, then off to the landfill. We diverted a number of loads to our West Bromwich and Cannock depots, which all costs money. Over such a short period of time it’s hard to evaluate these extra costs accurately but it must be in the region of £5-7,000 a week. This is a hidden cost of probably £60-70,000 over the installation, not that it’s that hidden much because Steve Broadley keeps reminding me of it. But it all has to be taken into consideration.

The big question is that even if we pulled out all the stops and spent the extra money to speed things up, would we have saved anything in the long run? I don’t think so.

And keeping a check on finances is imperative. The best thing we did was tie all our contractors down to a set price, it means they could produce no nasty surprises.

Companies reading this and thinking of undertaking similar projects, remember: hidden costs will crop up.

If you’re spending £1million on plant be aware there will be an extra £20,000 in costs lurking.

But as I sit here wondering what went wrong I have realised that while it’s been slow and frustrating and we had a few sleepless nights, we will all win come Easter when it is up and running and all this is forgotten – we might even say the same for the England football team by then.

I also wonder how any skip waste company without an organised and efficient recycling operation can cope. It has really hurt SB being without a plant for the last few weeks.
Anyway, enough reflection. Next issue you can all read about how well everything’s running. If not I’ll have gone the same way as Steve McClaren.

Andrew: 07773 715882