It is a joint partnership between housing associations Riverside and Plus Housing Group and construction company the Seddon Group.

The construction industry generates nearly a third of all waste in the UK - nearly 100 million tonnes a year. Up to 90% of this waste can be recycled, yet nationally 80% goes to landfill sites.

As well as being harmful to the environment, this is costly. The landfill tax of disposing of waste to landfill in 2009 is £40 a tonne, increasing to £66 per tonne when the “gate” fee and transport costs are included. With landfill tax set to increase by £8 a tonne each year until at least 2013, and transport costs rising as oil becomes more costly, it makes financial as well as environmental sense to use a local facility to recycle waste from building sites.

CIRCLE aims to help meet the government’s landfill reduction targets by processing up to 20,000 tons of construction waste a year - the equivalent weight of 10 double-decker buses every day.

Since its inception in autumn 2006, CIRCLE has diverted 28,000 tonnes from landfill, resulting in a saving of 43 tonnes of CO2 and delivering almost £70,000 of cost savings.

In 2008 alone, the operation handled over 9,000 loads of construction waste, an increase of 44% over the previous year, totalling 14,500 tonnes.

Mechanical sorting alone achieves significantly lower recycling rates than the hand sorting system used by CIRCLE which can achieve 90% recycling rates.

CIRCLE’s sorters divide the waste into various streams:
•    Rubble such as concrete and bricks which is ground down for aggregate.
•    Soil and green waste which is processed and re-used as second-grade soil or composted.
•    Wood which is converted to shavings for use either as horse bedding, which is a limited market, or as fuel for     a power station.
•    Paper and plastic – paper is repulped and pvc is reprocessed and reused in new production.
•    Glass which is ground and used in specialised reflective road surfaces.
•    Metal which is sold into well established markets for recycling and reusing metals.

The scheme was originally set up to reduce waste disposal for the group members and its subcontractors but now it is used by over 50 organisations across Liverpool.

CIRCLE provides jobs for local people – eight unemployed young people from Kensington have secured full time employment after having completed twelve weeks as Intermediary Labour Market placements with Liverpool City Council’s Transitional Employment Programme.

CIRCLE uses 1% of its revenue to support local not-for-profit community groups who are building community infrastructure such as new playgrounds discounts by offering them subsidised rates on skips.

Looking to the future, opportunities are currently being investigated for converting the residual waste into a form that can generate energy which, if successful, will result in achieving 100% recycling.

Following the success of the Liverpool project, the CIRCLE partners are in advanced planning to establish a sister operation in Salford.