Cheshire West and Chester Council’s Cabinet has approved the award of two key waste and recycling contracts at the Cabinet meeting on 16 October.
Following a review by Council officers, it is recommended that a contract is awarded to Cheshire West Recycling (CWR) to continue to deliver the Council’s kerbside recycling and waste collection service beyond March 2026, when the current contract comes to an end. It is also recommended that a new contract is awarded to CWR for the delivery of Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC) services. Both contracts will begin on 1 April 2026, for an initial period of eight years.
CWR are a Council-owned company and have been collecting residents’ waste and recycling since April 2020. They offer the kerbside collection of dry recycling, food waste, residual waste, garden waste and a bulky item collection service. In addition, CWR offer recycling and waste collections to Council owned Company Brio Leisure, some local schools, and operate a fleet maintenance services division.
HWRCs (also known as “tips”) are places where residents can dispose of extra household waste or recycling, as well as items that are not collected through the kerbside waste and recycling collection service. The Council operates seven HWRCs across the borough, in Chester, Ellesmere Port, Frodsham, Neston, Northwich, Tattenhall and Winsford. Each year, they are visited around 740,000 times and process approximately 40,000 tonnes of household waste and recycling.
The Council’s HWRCs have been managed by HW Martin Waste Limited since 2008 and is due to end on 31 March 2026. The Council has therefore carried out a review of potential commissioning delivery models, concluding that delivering services through its wholly owned Council company will provide the flexibility needed to deliver services efficiently over the longer term enabling the Council to respond to changes in environmental legislation and develop local partnerships to stop unwanted household items going to waste.
The contract awards are the next step in delivering the Council’s Waste Management Strategy, which was agreed in 2021, following the introduction of new recycling containers and new fleet of waste collection vehicles.
Cllr Karen Shore, Cabinet Member for Environment, Transport and Highways, said:
“CWR have done a fantastic job operating the kerbside waste and recycling collection service since 2020. The award of a new contract means that residents will continue to receive a high-quality service whilst offering best value to the Council. CWR are an important part of the Cheshire community. They have demonstrated they have built a strong foundation on which they can continue to deliver social and environmental benefits locally, such as recycling around 65,000 tonnes of waste, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by over 300 metric tonnes, and employing over 260 local people.
“HWRCs are another important strand to our efforts to recycle as much as possible, and they are vital to the Borough; they allow residents to dispose of and recycle items that can’t be collected through the regular kerbside service. As is set out in our Waste Management Strategy, we need to make sure that we can provide a modernised service that is easy to use, affordable to operate, and helps the Council reach our climate change goals.
“HW Martin have worked successfully with the Council since 2008 to deliver this popular service – receiving over 740,000 visits every year. They have successfully increased recycling performance across the sites, exceeding their contractual recycling target of 60 percent in 2023-24. The investment they have made into the service, such as the upgrades to the Chester HWRC in 2017, delivery of contract efficiencies, and the introduction of three re-use shops has helped us improve the customer experience. I would like to thank HW Martin for their work, and we will continue to work together to provide good quality services for our residents for the remainder of the contract.
“As CWR already operate kerbside collections, the synergy and consistency that they can provide by also managing our HWRCs not only offers the best value for money, but also gives us the chance to increase our re-use and recycling rate, and achieve our goal of the Borough becoming carbon neutral by 2045.”
For more information on HWRCs in Cheshire West and Chester, visit:
Find a recycling centre | Cheshire West and Chester Council
To see what can be recycled as part of your regular kerbside collection, visit:
What goes in my bin/box? | Cheshire West and Chester Council