In the Hart van Brabantlaan in the city of Tilburg, an island with underground compactors is now being used to serve an existing and a soon-to-be-completed apartment block. This concerns a high-rise tower block with 22 floors and 750 apartments.
“30 conventional containers are neither feasible nor desirable”
It is the municipality’s ambition to empty underground containers just once a week. To achieve this goal, the capacity needs to match the means of collection, explains Bob Brocks, Team Leader for purchasing and technology at BAT, the waste management company. “If we collected the waste from 750 households using conventional underground containers, we would need 30 of them. That’s simply not feasible in terms of space, nor is it desirable. Using two underground compactors for general waste and two more for paper/cardboard, plus one other for recyclable plastic, going by the amount of waste involved, it’s possible to empty just once per week.”
“We looked at the overall costs calculated over a period of ten years”
Bob Brocks adds: “The choice between an underground compactor and a conventional underground container is based on a cost analysis. We look at the overall costs calculated over a period of ten years, that is, the costs for the container plus the well, its installation and its maintenance. The upshot of this exercise was that investment in a Sidcon compactor, compared to a conventional container, worked out cheaper in the long run, on the basis of two or three compactors being acquired. At the moment we have not included the costs of the number of square metres of public space that the underground containers would occupy. But if you take the city centre, where space is at a premium, this can be factored in too.”
“Since 2013, the city of Tilburg has been using underground compactors for the collection of waste flows. We have been extremely satisfied with the underground compactors supplied by Sidcon in recent years,” explains Bob Brocks.
