Croydon, 25 October 2011 – Surrey Heath Borough Council has scooped a prestigious award at the National Recycling Awards 2011 for its work to boost recycling in the borough. Using address data from the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), managed with GGP’s gazetteer management software NGz, the Council has increased it’s overall recycling from 32 per cent to 64 per cent making it one of the best in the country.
The recycling scheme, called ROAR (Recycling Organic and Refuse) provides residents with separate wheeled bins for rubbish, mixed recycling and a sealed caddy for food waste. The award was in the “Local Authority Target Success” category which recognises those councils that have made a significant improvement in domestic recycling rates.
The address database was used to produce an initial list of residential properties that was then imported into the Council’s geographical information system (GIS). Additional data, such as collection day, assisted collections, collection zoning, bin allocation, bulk bin collection and restricted access collections, were tied back to the original addresses by use of the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) contained within individual NLPG records.
The use of the NGz managed NLPG has enabled Surrey Heath Council to create a geographically enabled view of waste and recycling in the borough which in turn has facilitated the generation of crew sheets for their waste contractor, produce targeted mailing for specific households and incorporate detailed property level data into the ‘My Surrey Heath’ web application.
“The residents of Surrey Heath now have much more scope for recycling,” commented James Rutter GIS Manager. “The previous ‘black sack’ collection method only allowed for a limited amount of recycling to be collected. Now the residents have a single green recycling bin for practically all recyclable materials including glass and paper. We also do a separate weekly food waste collection which is sent to a special processing facility where it is converted into fertilizer and electricity.”
“The use of the NLPG has been critical to the success of this project,” continued Rutter. “We have ambitious plans for the future based around the use of the NGz managed gazetteer including a restructuring of our Garden Waste Club. There is also a lot of momentum in the county for joint and partnership working and we believe that by basing frontline service information – such as waste and recycling – on the NLPG it will be much easier to contribute usefully.”
GGP NGz software has been specifically developed to ensure a consistent, up to date and accurate base for all property based information within an organisation. GGP NGz also manages the import and export of data between the local authority databases and the NLPG, the national hub, and the complete product suite was one of the first two software solutions to receive accreditation for address data transfer (DTF 7.3) and is fully compliant with BS7666.
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