Waste management is often seen as a national and global headache. It is a threat, of course, but it is an opportunity too and Cawleys makes it its business to acquaint its clients with ways of meeting their environmental goals, creating revenue streams and improving their image
By John O'Hanlon
It’s Cawleys’ 60th birthday this year, and to celebrate the fact the firm set up by brothers Frank and Reg Cawley in Luton, and which as F&R Cawley has grown into the best known commercial waste management firm in its geographical footprint from the East Midlands to the Home Counties, is rebranding. In point of fact it has been plain Cawleys to its clients for many years, and the changed logo and truck livery simply acknowledges that.
Cawleys is a commercial waste management contractor, and though it works with local authorities in many creative ways it doesn’t involve itself in domestic collection, neither does it plan to. As a family firm, says Kate Cawley, Business Development Manager, granddaughter of the founder and daughter of Managing Director Jon Cawley, it is able to be much more responsive to its clients than its large national rivals: it can also be much more responsive to changes in the market and the complex regulatory relating to waste collection, disposal and recycling. “We can reach decisions incredibly quickly! That’s one reason why we have no plans to go public or change the way the company is structured”
Recycling Manager Andrew Pegg agrees that though it’s uncommon for a family company to grow beyond a certain size in the UK it’s much more the norm in Europe and it has many functional advantages. “It definitely makes the decision making in the company a lot more efficient. There is just one man you need to reach if you want to make a decision very quickly.” The competition, mostly large PLCs, may have the advantages of scale when it comes to large contracts but they are typically unwieldy when it comes to translating policy into strategy, he says.
Regulation is both an issue and a boost to the market, especially when it comes to recycling, says Andrew Pegg. “The waste management industry is one of the most highly regulated in the UK I believe. To be honest that probably doesn’t affect us all that much on the recycling site. However regulation does affect out transport policy; for example a lot of things are now classed as hazardous waste that used not to be. They now have to be moved in specialist vehicles, taken to designated sites. As far as recycling is concerned, the regulations are generally designed to encourage recycling, and that has to be good for everyone.” Though he’s not a fanatical europhile he accepts that compliance with regulations like the WEEE Directive is something a business like Cawleys has to live with: “It’s constantly changing – and I’d say that it is another area where being a family business can help, because you can be that flexible and you can change that quickly.”
The business evolves
It would be quite wrong to see Cawleys as a company that simply collects and disposes of waste, says Kate. “We have evolved into an environmental advisory body now. We advise all our customers on their environmental auditing, and we have to make sure that everyone is bought in to the idea of recycling, whether or not they are ISO 14,001 accredited. We have worked with many companies to help them achieve that accreditation as the standard has evolved.” Much of the company’s work, and certainly much of her own time, is directed towards helping customers understand how recycling and a responsible waste management policy can actually save them money.
It’s an approach that has helped Cawleys grow from being a regional player: though still very much focused on the Beds, Herts, Bucks and Northants area, its vehicles daily brave the Congestion Zone. A good example is its work with the Treasury, for which Cawleys developed an office recycling scheme in partnership with cleaning contractor OCS. “Before we came along the Treasury wasn’t doing much recycling at all,” says Kate. “We have been promoting their recycling initiative, and giving them ideas like reducing the number of waste bins within the general office. We also try to make it more tangible for people, helping them to realise that if they recycle paper it can be turned into other products. We find that they become very keen to do it, if not to save money for the treasury, then to act responsibly and save the planet! I’m very proud of what we do,” she adds, “and each customer isn’t just a number for us. They are a valued customer.”
Cawleys runs a fleet of more than 100 trucks and has just invested in four new artics, painted in the new livery with the logo introduced in this year’s 60th anniversary rebranding. These will add bulk transportation capacity, for items like wood and plastics for example, to the existing mixed fleet which ranges from skip transporters of various kinds to rear-end loaders and curtainsiders. And of course there is always a certain residue that has to be taken to landfill. Landfill, though, is a word that is shunned at Cawleys these days, and all efforts are directed toward the day when zero landfill will be achieved for the company as a whole.
That is something of a holy grail, but it is possible and indeed encouraged for some of Cawleys' clients. If a company can claim that it has achieved zero-to-landfill, or putting it in another way 100 percent recycling, it is a great accolade for that company’s HSE statement and sure to feature prominently on its annual report.
The Material Recycling Facility
The jewel in Cawleys’ crown is its materials recycling facility at Luton, the first of its kind in the area and already a benchmark for the industry as a whole. Completed in 1997 it is a mixed MRF, which means that waste does not need to be pre-sorted before going through the system. It is designed to deal with all commercial and industrial waste streams. At present it is able to recover for recycling around 20 percent of the material it handles for major local clients including Milton Keynes-based IKEA, which prides itself on wasting absolutely nothing.
However this is going to increase to a massive 60 percent next year when a new plant is built within the existing MRF using a raft of innovative techniques including sophisticated screen magnets to remove ferrous material, and NIR or near infrared technology. This is a way of sorting plastic materials on a recycling operation wherein near and infrared energy illuminates particles of flake plastic including such as PET, PVC and PS transported along a conveyer line and the contaminant ingredients are identified and ejected from the stream general refuse. When it’s running, Andrew Pegg will look forward to showing it off, but until then he is not giving away too much information, saying only that it will be highly innovative and will confirm the MRF as a market leading treatment plant.
The new plant is a massive investment for the company, says Andrew Pegg, and will more than treble the amount of recycling the facility can do. “It’s part of the whole process of working towards higher recycling rates from general or mixed waste,” he says. After all it’s easy enough to recycle bulk paper or board, glass or other pre-segregated waste, but a much more difficult task with the stuff that comes in black plastic bags. That’s why the company spends so much time getting its customers to pre-segregate as much of their waste as possible. “If you can separate the recyclables out at source it makes the zero-to-landfill target a lot more achievable,” he says.
The Luton plant is not the only one. “We have MRFs at Wellingborough and Milton Keynes, and will be developing others in the future,” says Pegg.
Food for thought
In a world where people are starving, the amount of food that restaurants and supermarkets, let alone households throw away is scandalous. Cawleys has a very interesting working relationship with another family company, Biogen, a part of the Bedfordia Group of Companies. The Landfill Directive requires companies to meet stringent targets for the reduction of the amount of biodegradable and food waste going to landfill by 2020. Furthermore, this waste is subject to Landfill Tax, which will progressively encourage diversion away from landfill. As the number of landfill sites decline and costs increase, more food and biodegradable waste will need to find alternative disposal or recovery route. A truly ‘green’ alternative to the problem is anaerobic digestion (AD) which offers not only a value for money waste processing solution, but also prevents pollution, creating both renewable electricity and an odourless organic fertiliser. Food waste is recycled and no longer goes to landfill or for resource depleting incineration.
Food waste is mixed with pig manure to form a substrate that is used to create methane that in turn produces electricity for the grid. “We are the waste partners,” explains Kate Cawley, “so we have the sole tipping rights there and it’s exclusive to customers of ours. The plant has 50,000 tonnes a year capacity, so we’re working on diverting some 30,000 tons of food waste from landfill a year. In just one year the plant can process 12,000 tonnes of pig slurry and 30,000 tonnes of food waste, sufficient to continuously power up to 1,000 homes. Biogen plans to develop a network of plants throughout the UK, so this will potentially be an important growth area for Cawleys going forward.
Meanwhile, the partnership provides a dream solution to companies in the food industry that want to avoid contributing to the methane waste food will generate if it is allowed to rot in landfill. Hain Celestial UK is a Luton firm that supplies millions of sandwiches to Marks & Spencer every year. Now it sends 20 tonnes of food waste every week to the Biogen plant, via Cawleys. It has made a big difference to Hain, which now recycles more than 50 percent of its entire waste – in the summer of 2005 it was generating 35 cubic yards of waste every day. Now its compactors are emptied only twice a week and the firm aims to cut this to once a week within six months and eliminate it altogether within 12 months.
Kate explains how Cawleys likes to work with new customers: “We always do a site waste audit to find out what waste streams they have, how they are currently managing them, and whether we can improve it – nine times out of ten we can! Then we like to get the buy-in of all the staff and appoint a ‘waste champion’ internally – someone who can be a point of contact between us and the rest of the staff. Getting them to segregate the food into separate waste streams is often a big change from what they’ve been doing before. It’s a question of educating the customer to know that certain materials are not very good for recycling. But there are often alternatives. It is in their own interest, if we can recycle things it’s cheaper for them. A lot of people don’t realise how much they’re throwing away. When we do these waste audits we take them down to the MRF and show them how much material they’re throwing away, and they’re often shocked.”
Cawleys really is rather unique. It is of course a profitable business, but it is a business that has values not always associated with commerce. For example it will not hesitate to take on ‘awkward’ items plastic cups from which it can’t make money, as a service to the customer. Of course this attitude does it no harm in the eyes of its customer. As Andrew Pegg puts it, “We want to be a quality provider. The big PLCs are not particularly good at working in close proximity with their clients. We are a family run business, so service and quality are very high on our list of priorities. We generally find we can pick up the work that we need just by being there when we say we’re going to be there!”
So not rocket science then. As a good friend to the local community, I thought the best illustration of Cawleys’ ethos was its tree-planting programme. “The Forest of Marston Vale is pretty much at the centre of our area of operation,” says Kate. “We invited all our customers to have our newsletter via e-mail, and the money we saved by not having a printed newsletter we have invested in the forest.” This culminated in tree planting days, not only for the staff, but also for the customers, with whom the events proved popular, she says. “We have planted 4,000 trees to date, and we will be planting another 2,000 later on in the year, just to try and put something back into the world that we live and work in.”