re3 recycling centre scoops national award

20/10/2009

The re3 partnership´s new household waste recycling centre at Smallmead in Reading has been rated the top civic amenity site in the country

The site, which opened in January 2008, has won the Civic Amenity Site of the Year category in the prestigious letsrecycle.com Awards for Excellence in Recycling and Waste Management. The award winners were announced this week at a ceremony in London, hosted by television personality and newsreader Dermot Murnaghan. 

The judges, a panel of waste and recycling industry experts, saw the increased amount of waste sent for recycling from Smallmead and the extremely high user satisfaction with the new facility as two of the factors why the re3 centre beat off competition from runners up in Leeds and Warwickshire to take the top prize. More than 160 entries were received for the nine award categories.

The Smallmead recycling centre is used by over 6,000 users a week to recycle a wide range of materials and was rated a ‘good´ or ‘very good´ by 99% of users when it carried out its first user satisfaction survey.

The centre has been developed by the re3 partnership of Bracknell Forest, Reading and Wokingham Councils working with Waste Recycling Group. It´s part of a £610million, 25 year project to develop long term facilities to increase the amount of waste that is reused, recycled and composted across the three boroughs and to minimise the amount of waste sent to landfill.

In its first year of opening over 8,000 tonnes of waste were sent for recycling from the new site, compared with 6,339 tonnes in the last year of the old Island Road site

Councillor Rob Stanton, Chair of the re3 Board said:
“This is really fantastic news and I´m so pleased that Smallmead has been awarded this brilliant accolade - what an amazing achievement!
“I really am delighted that the high quality facilities, which the re3 partnership has developed, are being recognised as the absolute best in the country. This award is a tribute to the way that the three councils and WRG have worked so well together to invest in and build these first-class facilities.”

The Awards for Excellence are now in their sixth year and are run by letsrecycle.com, the UK's leading independent dedicated website for businesses, local authorities and community groups involved in recycling and waste management.

Steve Eminton, editor of letsrecycle.com said:
“This year we were looking for people who have built on the efforts they have made and not just those with high recycling rates. And, I think you will see from the winners that this has been reflected.”