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Officers at South Staffordshire Council have won the Citizen Award at the national GeoPlace Exemplar Awards for their work to overhaul waste collection in the district.
By using local data, including the latest address information, street data and new route-mapping technology, officers have been able to increase efficiency whilst saving nearly £400,000 of taxpayer's money in a single year, a reduction of 15%.
The use of the council's local address dataset was an essential part of the project and used to incorporate key service attributes to enable route optimisation to generate real world scenarios. The address data contained information about properties on assisted collections, additional bins and locations where collections were restricted between certain times.
The new technology has also meant the introduction of 150 new waste and recycling routes across the district, meaning collection days may not have to be changed for another 14 years. In total, the council along with Biffa Municipal Ltd performs 135,000 collections a fortnight to 46,000 properties.
The council also received the '2013 Exemplar Award,' awarded to organisations who have found ways to deliver better services more efficiently, and really make a difference to local residents.
Councillor Mary Bond, cabinet member for environmental services said: "The new waste collection system has been a year in the making, and has totally reorganised the way we collect rubbish in the district. Through the use of sophisticated mapping technology, we have been able to create a more efficient service that represents better value for money for council taxpayers.
"The new mapping software means we have been able to make routes more efficient and reduce unnecessary travel, which also has clear environmental benefits. We have also utilised our drivers and their local knowledge, to 'sanity check' mapping data and ensure the routes work on a practical level too.
"Winning these awards shows just how important it is that the work we do not only utilises modern mapping technology in an intelligent way, but, more importantly, it is having a positive impact on the lives of our local residents."
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GeoPlace
GeoPlace is a public sector limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey. GeoPlace's role is to create and maintain the National Address Gazetteer and the National Street Gazetteer for England and Wales, providing definitive sources of publicly-owned spatial address and street data for Great Britain.
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www.geoplace.co.uk
