Recycling expert Tidy Planet has won a contract to provide a new Rocket Composter to Warwickshire County Council for its office complex in Warwick, with the company already having the machines in place at its offices in Shire Hall and in five schools throughout the region. 

Tidy Planet first installed a Rocket composter at Shire Hall in 2002 and since this time the machine has diverted over 50 tonnes of food waste from landfill, with food waste from the site's 1,200 staff collected on a daily basis and loaded into the Rocket, which then turns the waste into compost within 14 days.

Due to the success of the machine at Shire Hall, the council asked Tidy Planet to assist with providing a greener solution for the food waste at some of the county's schools. Following a successful tender for Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation, Tidy Planet was then able to provide waste solutions to any public sector organisation in the country up until 2011, through an innovative open  tender,  this then  led to the council purchasing five Rocket Composters for their local  'exemplar' schools.

With schools in Warwickshire spending almost £400,000 a year on waste disposal, Warwickshire County Council was keen for the schools to find an alternative method to landfill. Last summer, Avon Valley School and Sports College, Studley High School, Alderman Smith High School, Polesworth International Language College and Kenilworth Sports and High, all implemented the Rocket and with the five sites producing a combined total of 1,000 kilogrammes of food waste per week, Tidy Planet will be able to divert over 40 tonnes of food waste from landfill per school year, which equates to 600 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Emily Martin, waste projects officer at Warwickshire County Council, said: 'We have been using the Rocket Composter for almost eight years now at Shire Hall and the results have been fantastic. The machine is very easy to use, requiring only 20-30 minutes of attention a day for sorting the waste for input and logging activity, offering us an environmentally friendly waste disposal method that is both greener and more economical than landfill.'