Thurrock Council

Thurrock is a unitary authority in South Essex and local to the northern side of the Dartford Crossing. Thurrock is a mixture of both urban and rural locations, with around 69,000 properties with several large industrialised areas including two busy ports on the river Thames. Thurrock residents have a three-bin system, comprising weekly garden & food waste collections, dry recyclables and residual waste.

The Solution

Thurrock have selected Collective as their mobile working solution to manage trade and domestic waste collection activities. In addition the system is widely used by the ‘Clean and Green’ Team that included Street Cleansing, Grounds Maintenance, Parks & Open Spaces and Play-Equipment safety & condition monitoring.

Andy Kelly Interim Strategic Lead for Waste at Thurrock Council explains:

“Within Waste Services, Trade collections were first to benefit from the introduction of Collective, then after a considerable period of testing by a small group of volunteer drivers was gradually rolled out to the remainder of the domestic collections teams with Garden & Food rounds completed last. As the garden & food rounds are reduced seasonally the system has allowed for a seamless transition from 7 to 6 then to 5 rounds, without the need to resort back to paper-based routes as all 3 sets of routes are already stored within the system for crews to select.”

Andy Kelly, Interim Strategic Lead

Collective has since been integrated with the Council’s back-office customer support system to allow support staff near real-time web-based access to specific property-based information logged by collection crews regarding ‘non-presented bins, blocked access to roads and contaminated recycling bins’, with garden & food contaminations to follow. This integration then auto-generates letters that are then sent to residents advising why their recycling bins may not have been emptied and more importantly what they can do about it in order to ensure their bin is emptied on the next scheduled collection.

The Result

“The introduction of Collective to the domestic collections fleet has enabled the Service to reach, exceed and maintain their ‘missed-bin’ KPI of 98.5% per 100,000 consecutively for over 12 months, which had not been constantly achieved during the 5 years prior to the introduction.”

Colleagues within the Clean & Green Team are able to log a multitude of completed ‘works’ including:

• the emptying of scheduled litter and dog bins across the borough,
• council-owned play-equipment monitoring visits
• work-activities of their staff via the integration through Smart-Phones that aid the creation of a complete picture of Clean & Green’s daily activities.

An added benefit of all operatives having Smart-Phones with direct access to both Collective and council emails is the workforce feel connected while being out and about doing their jobs.