Stephen Hope joined Berryman last month, having previously run Hales Waste's Manchester depot. He has now revealed his ambition to ultimately collect glass from every single pub, club or restaurant in England.
Mr Hope said: "My aim is to collect 220,000 tonnes a year, within two years. After that, I'd just like to keep on increasing collections, while maintaining efficiency."
Berryman has three main depots: one in Yorkshire, which serves the Leeds area; one in Dagenham, which collects from parts of London; and one in West Bromwich, which collects from the centre of Birmingham.
Before Hales was taken over by Biffa Waste Services in June 2003, it operated nine glass collections on the South Coast and in East Anglia for Berryman. Since the takeover, Mr Hope said, these collections have finished. Berryman has replaced them with collections run by small, local contractors.
The benefit of this is that trucks will only have short distances between their depots and their rounds, Mr Hope said. "Ideally, a truck will leave a yard in morning, and should be emptying its first bin in a quarter of an hour," he explained.
Smaller businesses
Mr Hope now wants to "fill in the gaps" created by recycle-more-glass's initial policy of securing collection agreements with chains of pubs and clubs, by also collecting from smaller businesses along established vehicle routes.
Last year, 712,000 tonnes glass were recycled in the UK. The recycle-more-glass scheme, which was acquired in early 2003 from Valpak, currently collects about 60,000 tonnes a year from more than 10,000 pubs, clubs, restaurants and bars.
Berryman's managing director, Mick Keogh, said: "Stephen represents an important step in growing the scheme, and making sure that we take every advantage of the 500,000 tonnes of glass available for collection in the commercial stream."
"To this effect, we will shortly be bringing our new state of the art colour separation technology on stream to deal with mixed collections."
Ambitious plans for new recycle-more-glass contracts manager
Commercial glass collections carried out by Berryman under the recycle-more-glass banner will more than triple if the company's new contracts manager achieves his ambition.