Melina Woollon, Head of Procurement at Bristol Waste Company and Director at Wallis and Woollon Consulting Ltd, explains why tackling key waste fleet inefficiencies starts with the Procurement team.
The brutal maths of inefficiency
In 2024/2025 alone, English local authorities managed 25 million tonnes of waste. Given this scale, any process redesign and improvement in key areas can add to significant cost savings for the public sector when aggregated.
This is especially true for local councils and their Teckal organisations, such as Bristol Waste Company, which are responsible for moving large weekly residential waste volumes.
This aggregation principle applies to waste industry inefficiencies too; these creep regularly and in small amounts, with the cost and service quality impact significant in time and at scale.
A few fleet operations examples feel familiar: unfit for purpose vehicles, expensive reactive maintenance, poor insight, inefficient processes, and behaviours which feel cultural.
Beyond these cautionary tales, it’s the long-term impact which is the most dramatic. Viewed tactically and in silo, these inefficiencies may be ignored as business-as-usual (BAU), but their aggregated cost is huge:
- wrong sized vehicles (manoeuvred safely at an additional cost);
- waste transfer stations with challenging designs (which normalise queues and downtime);
- unused, over-specified equipment;
- expensive, last minute spot-hired vehicles (forgotten about for months); and
- small route bottlenecks, which become labour- and time-consuming blockages and erode profitability.
The list goes on, and the maths is, as always, unforgiving: high cost per collected tonne and fuel, unplanned breakages with additional vehicle costs, underutilised stuff and over-budget spare parts.
Market engagement for all seasons
We’ve all experienced it: waste operations run on legacy vehicles that are no longer fit for a new job or purpose, too old or broken. Misspecifying your fleet means there is a high cost to redo work, add extra resources to tackle poor service or manage safety risks.
Procurement teams’ overcaution can avoid an upfront cost for a never-to-be used capability, however, underspecifying is just as dangerous. Cutting corners when sourcing often means utilising a vehicle beyond its limits or design assumptions. Both scenarios are terrifying in terms of safety and cost.
Getting the right waste fleet starts with a clear vision of your future operating model, and every moving piece in this process needs scrutiny: material density and variability; inbuilt site restrictions; staff patterns; real ground conditions; vehicle movement cycles and load capacity; operational risk profile and infrastructure challenges.
By skilfully driving these value-adding conversations, Procurement teams can avoid the classic trap of purchasing larger vehicles as the universal panacea to increasing service capacity.
Internal and external (suppliers) collaboration can help identify smaller amendments with huge impact on downtime, design cost, maintenance and fuel consumption.
In a Total Cost of Ownership model, vehicle purchasing cost may be minimal versus operating costs: this ratio truly matters in overall cost-effectiveness assessment.
The supply chain undoubtedly owns key industry insight: if (arguably) the Simple Recycling legislation hasn’t yet standardised waste collection, there is still an expensive, highly customised waste fleet for very customised service.
Therefore, market engagement becomes fundamental: it shifts the focus to vehicle trialling and their validated data, which pushes smart, low-cost innovations.
Proactive maintenance when the show must go on
A waste management service tends to continue when key resources are unavailable, and improvisation takes over under pressure: more vehicle hires, fuel, tweaked routes with complicated processes, and teams likely to shortcut their way into health and safety incidents.
This higher risk makes proactive maintenance in a high-usage environment equally about cost control and risk management: if a vehicle is idle, work needs to be redone, rounds reallocated and queues likely to build up.
This is not just firefighting angst, it’s a potential systemic failure: recurrent vehicle issues which are yet to be root-caused, maintenance schedules disconnected from real utilisation profile, vehicle parts ordering misaligned to critical maintenance issues.
This is when sustainability can truly shine: investing in asset Life Extension Programmes can help avoid disruptive failures whilst re-building (rather than replacing) vehicles, save energy and fuel and decrease operational impact.
The promised land? Planned maintenance schedules reflecting real-life utilisation patterns rather than calendar assumptions. Critical assets repairs fit for sites’ safety exposure, road conditions and traffic.
Vehicle availability as a critical KPI in a dashboard which points at hotspots and ultimately the right behaviours, asset designs and processes. Lower risk at a lower cost whilst switching off the symptom fixing button.
People and process, not vehicles
Insight quality, not data quantity, ultimately drives change, and endless, colourful dashboards are pointless unless they shape decisions. Simplification is key, and a small, clear number of indicators can truly drive those behavioural changes which matter.
Procurement teams can use this insight at tender stage: whether it’s vehicle utilisation, fuel consumption profile or behaviour patterns, a smart KPI dashboard shapes a smart performance conversation with data-backed facts, instead of defensive opinions, and may rightly point at process, not operators.
Sourcing the best vehicles available won’t impact outcomes unless utilised effectively. This is where the right behaviours matter, and training may quickly become a hard leaver and a crucial tender assessment element: it can finally convince operations teams to use, rather than ignore, technology whilst connecting them to process outcomes.
Upfront engagement means essential details are not missed whilst buy-in is secured, however, a new fleet is about change management. Bringing people on the journey must include the right support and resources and communicate clear benefits.
The future of municipal waste management remains complex, and people-shaped, not vehicle-shaped. In a highly regulated, resource-poor public sector environment, it’s the energising mix of recycling zeitgeist and powerful AI which places optimisation as the new BAU at the heart of resource management.
Until the brutal facts of scaled up inefficiencies are accepted and Procurement teams fully utilised, we will continue to operate the wrong waste fleet in the wrong way and ultimately deliver a broken service.
