PaddingtonNow Business Improvement District will continue their partnership with Recycling company First Mile for a further two years until 2020.
A major focus of the renewed partnership will be food recycling. 1.7m tonnes of food is dumped annually in the UK releasing harmful methane gas into the environment. PaddingtonNow will be subsidising food recycling services for the environmentally-minded businesses in the BID area, turning food waste into clean energy and fertiliser via anaerobic digestion, increasing their 86% recycling rate even further. Together PaddingtonNow BID and First Mile are also piloting new technologies to reduce contamination of recycling and measure the air quality impact of using one round to collect all waste.
PaddingtonNow BID currently has 306 members which include hotels, offices and food establishments in the area. Those serviced by First Mile represent over 1,600 tonnes of recycling material per year. Some changes have been made to the service this year; these changes reflect a desire for efficiency and improved recycling rates. Some elements of the service have been revised like electronic WEEE collections and bulky item collections. Refinements to the Dry Mixed Recycling and Food Waste collections now run on a fair usage basis. This helps to ensure that our members are committed to the service and that we are ensuring value for money for our members.
Chris Peers, BID Manager of PaddingtonNow commented, “We’ve developed a great level of mutual trust over the past nine years with First Mile, and are looking forward to rolling out new ways of increasing our environmental impact in 2018 and beyond. Our partnership with First Mile makes it easy for our members to recycle more of their waste and provides access to a good customer experience. Having a high density of members using the same provider also has huge benefits for local air quality by consolidating collections in the area on to just one vehicle.
Bruce Bratley, Founder and CEO for First Mile, said: “Having enjoyed a fantastic partnership with the team at PaddingtonNow for almost a decade, we’re thrilled to continue working with them to improve recycling rates in the district. PaddingtonNow’s vision to tackle contamination and pilot new technology with us to ensure more material is recycled is admirable. We look forward to another two years of improving recycling rates in Paddington.”
ABOUT FIRSTMILE
First Mile is a waste and recycling company founded in 2004 revolutionise business waste and recycling services. They believe in a world where you can make it easy for customers to recycle everything which is why they provide simple, low cost recycling and waste services for over 20,000 businesses in London and Birmingham.
