Cheshire East Council – Municipal Waste Strategy

Walker Resource Management Limited (WRM) was appointed by Cheshire East Council (the Council) to review and update the Council’s municipal waste strategy to reflect municipal waste management performance metrics, progress made against previous strategy aims and targets, conformance progress and impacts of forthcoming policy reforms; and options that enable the council to address, prepare and respond to market and policy changes.

WRM’s review and update to the municipal waste strategy included the following work packages and methodologies, summarised below:

1. Summarise legislative, policy and market developments and produce a gap analysis against Cheshire East’s position:

• • including but not limited to Simpler Recycling, Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).

2. Evaluate the impacts of policy and market drivers:

• • waste flow modelling to assess the impact of Simpler Recycling, DRS and ETS on municipal waste composition, waste arisings and treatment costs.

3. Longlist of waste strategy interventions:

• • development of a strategy action tracker tool including a full range of strategy responses which are available to the Council.
  • The strategy action tracker is a tool for the Council to monitor progress against strategy actions.

4. Shortlist the selected interventions

• • stakeholder engagement to understand views and priorities of members, including semi structured interviews with responsible offers on the political acceptability of proposals.
  • formally assessing and weighting priorities of the Council through WRM’s waste strategy qualitative evaluation tool which enables the views of Officer and Member opinions to be applied to options.

5. Revision of the strategy document

• • incorporate the revisions from the review process and reframe the strategic objectives to align with the waste reforms, adding to the detail of the tactical or action levels of the strategy.

The project provides Cheshire East Council with a revised municipal waste strategy. The revised strategy reflects changes to national and local policies, evaluates forthcoming policy reform impacts on waste arisings and waste composition of DMR, residual and organics streams; and presents options for the Council to respond to policy and market changes. WRM presented the findings to the Project Team, enabling discussion of key results and consideration of next steps. WRM have provided the Council with the tools to progress the aims and objectives of the strategy through the development of strategy action allocation and progress tracker.