About UsFor over twenty years, we've provided a service to a majority of local authorities in Wales to work collaboratively in achieving environmental and economic efficiency savings, growth in social value, shared technical knowledge and skills all through working together fundamentally on regional recycling and reuse contracts plus staff, Officer and Elected Member training.
This is delivered through the funding of regional waste co-ordinator to oversee and manage the working group to its objectives and training needs. The regional waste co-ordinator is James Kay and the present group of fourteen local authorities are known as the Collaborating Local Authorities in Resource Efficiency (CLAIRE) Wales group. |
Who We Are |
James Kay, regional waste co-ordinator and Victoria Bond, assistant regional waste co-ordinator.
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Our History |
Resource Efficiency Wales and prior to it, The Wales Environment Trust has worked with waste authorities in Wales since the new millennium. Just prior 2000, the Wales Environment Trust wrote to every council in Wales and introduced its Wastes Partnership Initiative wherein, if two or more waste authorities were prepared to examine the potential for benefits arising from a collaborative and co-operative liaison, the Trust would fund a feasibility study to that effect. A collection of six authorities responded positively and between them, the Trust and the Welsh Development Agency, who were keen to support the initiative a tender brief for the work was advertised.
The study was broad in its examination, looking at existing waste collection methods together with end treatments of the collected waste. It also considered joint use of recycling and treatment facilities using appropriate new technologies and the merits of sites suggested by the authorities as appropriate locations for these Eco-Parks. The study was completed and was an achievement in so much as it laid out both, the disparities and shortcomings as well as the strengths of the waste service and the greater extent to which the necessary funding for the future waste infrastructure requirements needed to be considered. Whilst the study did not result in on-site development of facilities, it certainly brought about recognition of the merits of collaboration in the field of waste management. This was so evidently the case that the six authorities agreed to the appointment of a Regional waste Co-ordinator, funded equally by each authority with support from the Wales Environment Trust and who would be accommodated in the Trust’s offices in order to aid impartiality of approach. Funding of the Co-ordinator role was soon taken up by four further authorities to form the SE Wales Regional Waste Group. More recently the group has widened into a South Wales influence with two West Wales’ authorities joining. City & County of Swansea are the latest local authority to join in 2017. The existing CLAIRE Wales group comprises fourteen local authorities which are:
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