Sweeper manufacturer Hako-Werke recently hired the impressive Erdgeschloss 'Snow Dome' indoor ski centre in northern Germany to show its product programme for the coming season.
The four seasons - winter, spring, summer and autumn (fall) - formed the basic theme for a series of seminars from leading municipal professionals from around Europe which ran alongside the product demonstrations.
Central to the theme of well attended seminars (around 1400 visitors were recorded) was the contrast between static, or reduced government grants to cover highway maintenance and cleansing, groundscare and waste and recycling and demands from residents for improved standards of service.
As if that wasn't hard enough to achieve, a number of speakers expressed concern that steps to reduce the workforce - as an 'easy' solution to reducing overheads - could have highly negative results. Replacing experienced employees with cheaper out-sourced agency labour was most likely to further reduce standards of cleansing.
In what was referred to as the 'pyramid of chaos', the dangers of combining a number of functions into one combined department - thus increasing the workload - or, at the other end of the scale, splitting up each specific task into a separate 'contract' that could be won by an uncoordinated number of different contractors was also discussed.
A solution that is said to offer efficiency savings of up to 20%, was explained by Gunther Rademacher from Stradtreinigung Hamburg. The city of Hamburg has been subject to all the above budget pressures, while at the same time, the authorities are trying to increase tourism.
The solution, he said, was 'Teamwork' - assigning teams of workers to be responsible for all the cleansing-related tasks such as street cleaning and litter collection, groundscare functions and other closely-related tasks within each neighbourhood. This style of management is also referred to as 'giving ownership' to the workforce - in other words, giving the actual crews on the ground, the responsibility of completing the tasks in the way that suits them best, but to an agreed specification.
And the Hako connection? Hand-in-hand with this approach comes the advantages of using a multi-purpose 'tool carrier'. In other words, one host machine working with a number of both seasonally-related attachments (snow clearance equipment in winter, grass cutting in summer, for example) and as required, a number of specialised attachments that might be swapped during the same week. To achieve this, machines such as the articulated steering 35kW Hako 'Citytrac' 4200DA and the four wheel steering Tremo 'Carrier' ranges (the latter made by the Multicar division of Hako) are ideal.
This is a theme that collection, transport and plant correspondent, Malcolm Bates will be examining in more detail in the next - and following - editions of Waste Management World.
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