Hillend Engineering’s Marketing Manager Paula Cunningham left her laptop behind for the day when she joined customer Oxford-based ODS Group for the 5.00 am food waste collection to find out the challenges faced in collecting food waste in a bustling city and to see how our MICRO XHD would perform, writes Hillend Engineering’s Aftersales Director Paul Brown.
With the deadline to implement weekly food waste collections getting closer, and high numbers of local authorities and waste management companies looking to procure specialist vehicles for their fleets, it’s more important than ever to learn from the experiences of industry peers.
Established in 2012, ODS Group provides commercial and public sector facilities management services to over 1,400 businesses and 65,000 households across Oxford and beyond. The group sets high standards, as demonstrated by almost 40 accreditations in trade and health and safety, and its trade food waste collection service supports busy restaurants, catering companies, schools and colleges across Oxford, collecting wheeled bins, sacks and caddies six days a week.
Oxford City and the surrounding areas are busy environments, and meeting at ODS Group’s well-appointed Cowley depot at 4.30 am is essential to make a prompt 5.00 am start and maximise the opportunity to get ahead of rush hour traffic. At this point, the reliability of vehicles and the previous end-of-day preparation are ultra-important, something that Paula’s colleague for the day, driver and operator Colin, is clearly all over.
The 12-tonne MICRO XHD, on a DAF chassis, is one of five that ODS Group has in its fleet. Built at Hillend Engineering’s factory in Dunfermline, the MICRO XHD has been designed to have a high-capacity payload of up to six tonnes whilst also being nimble enough to cope with busy, narrow streets. The beautiful, characterful streets of Oxford City are the perfect proving ground for this vehicle.
The first observation was Colin’s cheerful, knowledgeable, and highly efficient attitude at 4:30 am, a quality greatly appreciated by Paula and a good advertisement for a 23-year career with ODS Group, the last five years focused on food waste collection.
Paula, having used the word ‘manoeuvrable’ more times in the last two years than at any other time in her career, was pleased to hear from Colin that he particularly liked the good turning circle of the MICRO XHD, which is helpful for accessing the narrow streets, tight entrances and car parks in and around Oxford.
By 6.35 am, the team has collected food waste from 40 trade sites, and the traffic is increasing, as are the number of cyclists. Rush hour inevitably slows down the progress, but the combination of Colin’s collection efficiency, effective route planning, the MICRO XHD’s nimbleness in between vehicles, and its fast 22-second loading time ensures that the collection keeps to schedule.
One of the biggest challenges for waste management teams is calculating the volume of food waste they’re likely to be handling each week and, therefore, the required size and number of vehicles. This calculation is clearly made more complex by food waste output varying day-to-day, week-to-week and even month-to-month with student holidays, peak restaurant and bar times, and even menu choices with large volumes of waste content, such as bones.
A big fluctuation in waste collected is difficult to predict, and fleet operators will become accustomed to when peak periods in their own territories will occur and when waste will need to be tipped more frequently. The MICRO XHD’s six-tonne payload and top-mounted sweeping compaction system ensures forward load and weight distribution to maximise body volume.
ODS Group’s vehicles have in-cab weighing systems to measure the weight of waste from each customer’s collection containers, and the total weight of waste collected during a round is displayed to the driver en route and to the operations team to enable load tipping to be planned efficiently.
The MICRO XHD has a tipping body to ensure that waste is fully discharged, and it’s easy-to-operate controls unload the full body in 35 seconds, enabling the vehicle to be back in operation as quickly as possible.
By the time the ODS Group’s MICRO XHD is reaching capacity, nearly all of the day’s 90 collections have been made, ranging from individual 23-litre caddies at roadside restaurants to 14 large red-wheeled bins at one multi-plex site. The streets of Oxford are efficiently cleared of food waste, Colin has speedily paced an impressive 20,700 steps, and the MICRO XHD has done its job well.
Hillend Engineering knows the benefits of working closely with customers to understand the challenges they face, both from the perspective of the transport manager procuring vehicles and maintaining a reliable, efficient fleet, and also from the operator who wants their collection to be smooth and uncompromised.
We want to thank ODS Group, particularly Colin, for their invaluable insight and time in facilitating this visit for Paula.
Our latest MICRO XHD with new updates will be launching over the coming weeks, and with significant new investment coming from the Farid Zoeller Group, our Dunfermline factory and our Aftersales service will be in a great position to further support customers as they meet the challenges of weekly food waste collections.
