Wokingham

The Wokingham re3 business waste strategy, which helps companies across central Berkshire bin their bad rubbish and recycling habits, has this month picked up a national Green Apple Award – just weeks after the partnership scooped an accolade for best civic amenity site of the year.

Peter Baveystock, waste and recycling manager from Wokingham Borough Council, collected a Green Apple Award in the Environmental Best Practice category for the work the re3 partnership between Bracknell Forest, Reading and Wokingham Borough Councils and the Waste Recycling Group (WRG) has been doing around reducing business waste in central Berkshire. The prestigious awards are are judged and presented by the Chartered Institute of Waste Management (CIWM).

This Wokingham award comes just weeks after re3 scooped the Civic Amenity Site of the Year gong for Smallmead household waste and recycling centre in the letsrecycle.com awards. It also follows on from residents giving the new re3 recycling centres in Reading and Bracknell top marks in their latest independent user satisfaction surveys - with 98 per cent of people rating the sites as ‘very good’ or good overall.

The Wokingham partnership picked up the Green Apple Award for its business waste strategy, which was approved earlier this year after businesses across central Berkshire were quizzed on their waste and recycling habits in autumn 2008 and asked how the partnership and local authorities could make recycling easier for them.

Wokingham Borough Council’s Peter Baveystock and Steve Pearce, senior environmental consultant at Scott Wilson, the company that carried out research for the project, collected the award at a ceremony in the House of Commons on Tuesday November 17.

The Wokingham waste strategy, which was successful in achieving the Green Apple Award, outlines nine different objectives for the three partnership councils, including:

• To support the reduction of business waste by raising awareness of what business are legally expected to do and providing additional support
• To encourage more local re-use and reprocessing schemes
• To provide, or put in place, suitable recycling collections for all businesses
• To provide more easily available information for businesses on how, what and where to recycle.

Wokingham Borough Council’s Peter Baveystock, said: “I’m pleased that I was able to pick up this award on behalf of the re3 partnership – it demonstrates that yet again re3 is delivering some of the best quality waste and recycling services for the residents, businesses and taxpayers of the three local authorities in central Berkshire and is leading the way nationally in different areas of waste management.

“It was a real privilege to pick it up on the partnership’s behalf and I’d like to thank everyone who has been involved in making the business waste strategy such a success. I hope that other local authorities and waste groups are now able to use some of the ideas we’ve come up in our strategy with to shape their business waste plans in the future.”

Wokingham Borough Council