Turning problems into opportunities

Veolia’s Gary Clark talks to Steve Hobson about the transformation of the waste industry over the past few decades and what the future might bring

Veolia UK fleet director Gary Clark takes the expression “the biggest problem is the biggest opportunity” very seriously.

In the UK Veolia employs 13,000 people and is based in Kings Cross, London, with a regional office in Cannock, Staffordshire. It runs a whole host of environmental services including recycling and waste management contracts for over 30 local authorities. The business began in the UK in the 1990s with the start of compulsory competitive tendering of local authority services, and was originally called Onyx. It rebranded as Veolia Environmental Services in 2005 and is now part of Veolia Environnement, the global resource management business that is listed on the Paris stock exchange and turns over €42bn (£37bn) a year.

Clark has been with Veolia for 20 years and MT meets him at the company’s Wembley depot and workshop. The firm is due to take delivery of 40 Dennis Eagle eConnect battery electric refuse collection vehicles (RCVs) to replace diesel vehicles on its waste (or recycling, as it

FULLY COMMITTED: Gary Clark has been working for Veolia for 20 years, but his career in the environmental industry began in 1980 now prefers to call it) collection contract with Westminster City Council.

The size of the problem – and so the opportunity – is clear: studies have shown that an RCV on a stop-start urban collection round can be doing as little as 1.5mpg. That makes it an ideal application to switch to electric as it can use stored energy when needed to operate the compactor or drive the vehicle, rather than having an internal combustion engine running all the time.

Emission-free partnership

Veolia has held the domestic and commercial recycling collection contract with Westminster since first winning it in 1993, and it operates 250 vehicles on this 24/7 contract.

“This is a partnership and Westminster has invested through us to take steps towards emission-free transport,” says Clark. “This project started seven years ago and the collaboration never stops growing.”

Veolia was already buying diesel RCVs from Dennis but it runs a multi-brand fleet, which includes other leading chassis manufacturers.

“Veolia works closely with customers and suppliers to find the right solutions,” says Clark. “We are seeing a steady increase in requests to procure electric vehicles, especially from our municipal clients who have stringent sustainability goals. Over three-quarters of local authorities have declared climate emergencies and many are targeting net zero by 2030, so there is real impetus to transition to zero emission operations.”

By 2030, Veolia expects at least 10% of its fleet to be powered by electricity or alternative zero emission technologies. In 2030, it will stop buying fossil fuel powered RCVs and by 2040 its fleet will be fully decarbonised.

Veolia already has around 200 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) on the road on its recycling collections and street cleansing operations in partnership with UK local authorities. Where battery electric is not yet feasible, it is using transition fuels like hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to reduce carbon emissions.

While Clark does see a potential role for hydrogen fuel cells for logistics operations applications, he says the biggest problem – apart from the even higher purchase price – will be refuelling infrastructure.

Clark started out as a 16-year-old truck maintenance apprentice in 1980, working for Ready Mixed Concrete (now RMC Group) and Hales Waste.

“I was really lucky to have lots of career support from Ready Mixed Concrete, but reached the end of that path when RMC decided to amalgamate all of the 64 group workshops nationally,” he says. “I was drawn away from my engineering area and was asked to review and consolidate the locations. I spent three years travelling the country, working with workshops and suppliers, speaking to people, and calculating how a workshop would look after all group activities.”

Then in 2003 RMC decided to sell Hales Waste and RMC Truck Care to Biffa.

“Biffa was going to be faced with exactly the same situation, and they wanted me to go through the same process,” Clark says. “I said ‘I’ve done that for three years’ and I took redundancy and joined Onyx as transport manager.

“I took an opportunity as I had this desire to understand municipal, which is quite complex. Onyx gave me lots of opportunities and in 2016 I was promoted to fleet director.”

The changing role of waste

While Veolia operates the largest fleet in the UK’s waste sector, Clark says the business is “much more than that”.

“If you go back 20 or 30 years, it was all about transporting and disposing of waste,” he says. “It was just rubbish. But if you look at the transformation we’ve gone through, this rubbish is now a tremendously valuable resource.

“Valuable in a direct way, in that it is a commodity, and valuable in an ecological way, in that if we don’t do something with it, we’re going to stick it in the ground and then realise it’s doing something wrong to the planet.

“We have water treatment, waste treatment, energy from waste and we recycle plastic. We work with our customers to separate the streams of material, not waste, and reduce the amount of material that goes to landfill.”

Clark gained some experience with alternative fuels when he experimented with early gas trucks, which suffered from a combination of being conversions of diesel and petrol engines and high water content in the mains gas they were powered by. He also had bad experiences with dual fuel methane/diesel and diesel/electric hybrids, but when the second generation of compressed natural gas (CNG) trucks emerged, Veolia trialled a small fleet of 6.5 and 26 tonners.

“In a similar way, the manufacturer had taken a route to market for the vehicle, with bottom-end and top-end adjustments,” says Clark. “It wasn’t bespoke in design and as an engineer I was thinking ‘you’ve got to have bespoke design’.

LONG SERVICE: Veolia has been running recycling collection services for Westminster City Council since 1993, and currently operates 250 vehicles on this 24/7 contract

“Symbolically, a diesel vehicle is like a carthorse. It’s slow, but it is very resilient to heavy load. Then you’ve got a racehorse. It can run as fast as you like, but if you put weight on it, it’s going to break its legs.

“I used the analogy in communication with the business that CNG was the racehorse. You could generate the power and energy you needed, but we would need bespoke design and smart ancillary turbochargers or superchargers.”

Armed with this experience, in 2017 Clark trialled 16 CNG 26-tonners inside the M25 for one of Veolia’s public sector clients.

“I said ‘right, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove it scientifically’,” he says. “We said ‘we’re going

The Effect Of Charging Cycles On Battery Life

As experience with battery electric commercial vehicles is still limited, one of the big unknowns when calculating their total cost of ownership is the working life of the batteries. This is important as the battery packs probably represent 75% of the cost of a BEV and they will require replacing at least once in the life of the vehicle.

“We don’t have the correct analytics around the battery and the effects of the frequency of charging,” says Clark. “It’s not just plugging in and forget about it – you have to manage the situation because the concern we have is will there be significant battery degradation to the extent we can’t use them and we’ve got to buy new batteries?

“That’s why we’re putting a piece of work into place to understand that you’ve got these high-value assets and are there other options for us not to buy the battery but to have a contract on it? Can we take that as an operating cost rather than a capital expenditure and put that risk onto the battery manufacturer? Maybe we could pay on a monthly basis and we won’t end up with this huge cost.

“We’re trying to mitigate this area, because everyone’s talking about renting batteries but nobody’s doing it. I want to encourage the market – we don’t expect to get it for free, we know it’s going to come at a premium, but that has to clearly offset the ridiculous situation of having a useful asset you can’t use because you’re paying tens of thousands of pounds for batteries.” to data log these vehicles, replicate the duty cycle, get the averages and flatten them out’. We proved without question that when you look at a Euro-6 CNG refuse compaction vehicle at 26 tonnes working in an urban environment, the emissions performance was worse than a Euro-6 diesel.

“That was our springboard to focus on battery electric vehicles.”

Net-zero targets

While Euro-6 diesel or gas engines are generally considered clean when it comes to local emissions performance, the focus has now shifted to climate change and the need to cut carbon emissions too. In common with many local authorities, Westminster City Council has set itself a ‘Fairer Environment’ target of becoming a net zero council by 2030 and a net zero city by 2040.

“All organisations have got to have a net-zero plan,” says Clark. “Euro standards are about carbon oxide, nitrogen oxide (NOx), hydrocarbons and particulate matter (PM). There has been no reference to CO2 at all through the Euro standards.

“If you look at the manufacturers they are all spending lots of money on R&D for BEVs and arguably hydrogen fuel and now Euro-7,” says Clark. “From a manufacturer’s perspective, I would be thinking ‘we’ve got to have a plan in terms of our investment and our return’.

LOW OR HIGH MAINTENANCE?

Like many in the logistics sector, Clark is passionate about the career opportunities the sector can offer young people.

“I’ve only ever worked in the environmental sector,” he says. “It’s all I’ve ever known, but what I love is that every single day we’re generating some really special opportunities for people to join us.

“We need to really focus on bringing people through the ranks. We have some tremendous candidates that have come through and they’re now moving forwards into more academic training and soft skilling as well.

“But we are struggling to find the people to join as technicians. This is not uncommon and all the manufacturers, operators and fleet workshops have the same problem.

“Many operators and dealerships would tend to take somebody with commercial vehicle technical qualifications and we’re not dissimilar. We have generated an upskilling programme and have six people on it and another six in the pipeline. We are working with S&B Academy in Bristol to upskill them and pay them accordingly, so that if they do this extra vocational training and demonstrate the benefit to us we put them on more money.”

“I feel quite confident within the next couple of years, some manufacturers are going to be coming to me and saying ‘come 2027, if you want to buy a 7.5 to 18 tonner, you can only buy a BEV’.”

The truck OEMs have a number of deadlines to meet – by 2025 average carbon emissions across their range must be 15% lower than in 2020 and by 2030, 30% lower. By 2035 the UK will ban the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) trucks under 26 tonnes and by 2040 sales of new ICE trucks above that weight will be banned. The arrival of Euro-7 in 2027 will just complicate the issue, but what is certain is that the manufacturers will soon start having to push zero-emission vehicles into the market.

Cost concerns

“We and other businesses are in exactly the same position – there’s lots of nervousness around committing to what somebody tells us,” says Clark. “That BEV downstairs is £500,000, while a diesel version is about £190,000.”

While R&M and fuel costs are potentially lower for BEVs than for diesel trucks, there are still plenty of uncertainties around the life and replacement cost of batteries, how they will be charged and the productivity of a BEV.

“People are making very serious commercial decisions on that sales pitch with little guarantee,” says Clark. “We are in a position that we are operating an increased number of these vehicles and we need to draw the right people together: finance people, battery experts, energy experts, fleet people. We are going to produce our own mechanism to measure not just the vehicle cost but also the indirect cost in terms of availability and infrastructure in comparison with an ICE vehicle.”

The first generation of BEVs simply replaced the ICE with an electric motor, retaining a gearbox, prop shaft and mechanical axles, but the Mercedes-Benz second generation BEV uses a Daimler electric axle.

“All the mechanical parts from the front of the vehicle to the axle are gone,” says Clark. “That vehicle is on trial with Veolia in the UK. It should be 15% to 20% more efficient due to reduced friction in the drive line.

“Mercedes very much sees us as a partner, especially in this sector. I’m sure there’s going to be a secondgeneration plus one when the battery technology changes from wet lithium ion to solid composite. The next technological change in the development of BEV vehicles is going to be the batteries. We are going to have more energy density, less weight and greater resistance to battery degradation when charging.”

As Veolia does most of its vehicle maintenance in-house, this upskilling is now starting to involve R&M on BEVs, an area where there currently are few standards – so the firm is writing its own in the form of a Veolia Minimum Requirement (VMR) that sets out basic safety procedures to minimise risk with these high voltage electrical systems.

“We have apprentices that have BEV training as part of their apprenticeship,” says Clark. “We’ve got all these ICE techs and while we have increasing numbers of BEVs it is still at the very beginning. Of 8,500 vehicles, just 200 are BEVs but we need to have a strategy to move ICE technicians to BEV technicians.

“This has been done with one of the BEV manufacturers, but we’ve also appointed Autotech in Milton Keynes to train our techs to the IMI diploma in battery electric vehicle engineering, so that we finish up with an amalgamation of product knowledge and fully accredited training.

“By the middle of this year we will have a reasonable number of our technicians through that training, and then we will start to bring the BEV maintenance in-house. The business is in a process of perpetual evolution and the technology is moving so fast that you cannot stand still. This is truly an exciting place to be!”