I met with Ubico (our waste partner) to learn about the changes coming with new lorries and systems being introduced into the fleet. Reliability has become a big problem on the current fleet as they’re now becoming quite old and experience now shows that things like recycling vehicles start to become difficult and expensive to repair after only 6 or so years. Some of the lorries handling garden recycling and residual waste are even older. The new fleet will help to sort out reliability problems, if we’re late picking up your bins then lorries being off-road is the most likely reason currently.

The new lorries are more fuel efficient with lower carbon emissions, they also have a lot of new safety features – such as 360 degree cameras for safety-vision and monitoring of the way that the vehicle is being driven. Once the new lorries start to be introduced we will also be rolling out new “in-cab” technology – bit like a smartphone/tablet in the driver’s cab – that helps us to manage problems with missed bin collections and residents not putting out their bins on time. That will help us to communicate problems, like road closures and accidents, quickly to all the teams so that we can start to make changes before other lorries run into the same problems.