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Manvik Ireland is the market leader in the sale and hire of Waste Handling Solutions.. Manvik primarily offers waste equipment or ‘plant’ which includes
Refuse Vehicles, Weighting Systems, Material Recycling Facilities (MRF’s), Compactors and Shredders.
A significant and growing part of Manvik’s business in Ireland is contract hire of waste management equipment. In the current economic climate hiring is becoming a far more popular option, with funding for the outright purchase of what is generally quite expensive equipment, tough to get right now.
Declan Murray, managing director, Manvik Ireland explained the background to this thriving company. “We are part of a group of companies which trade under Manvik Group. Currently we have operations in Cork, Dublin, Belfast, Bristol, Birmingham and London. The company has ambitious growth plans and is looking to broaden our coverage in existing markets and enter new markets.
We have been serving Private and Municipal Waste operators in Ireland for the past 20 years and almost five years in the UK. Our Irish operation has trebled turnover in the past eight years and as a Group we will turnover in excess of €50 Million Euro at the end of this year.
Murray identified the key factors that have underpinned the company’s growth in recent years. “The driving force has been twofold. The first is Manvik’s ability to offer a full service solution. This is a contract hire arrangement where we supply the equipment and all of the related support over the duration of the term at a fixed cost. This takes a lot of the guess work and risk off the table for our customers and allows them to focus on their core business.
Secondly, our ability to provide a complete service offering with nationwide support around the complex equipment required to operate in the Waste value chain. We offer and end to end solution from containers for the refuse, vehicles to collect the various stream, weighing solutions for customer billing, to transfer stations/MRF/composting facilities to sort and process the waste. We are also leaders in the supply of the weighing systems to deal with all waste streams.
Manvik hires to both the private and public sector waste management service providers. “The waste collection fleet in the four local authorities in Dublin is hired from Manvik and at present we also hire to Greyhound, Oxigen, Panda and many other private operators”, said Murray.
He confirmed that operators in Ireland seem to understand and appreciate the merits of a contract hire. “Hiring, particularly large and expensive equipment is attractive option for many reasons, not least the current credit crunch environment, where funding is hard to get, but also hiring makes sense when you consider the overheads associated with running a maintenance facility”.
He continued, “Those who hire enjoy more effective capacity management, reduced overheads, predicable operating costs, and overall better fleet availability. They gain access to a modern fleet, without the overheads of supporting complex equipment which is operationally critical.”
Manvik has been at the leading edge of new technologies employed in the waste management sector in recent years. “For example, Manvik has worked very closely with the manufactures of pay by weight systems. All these offerings had to be extensively customised in order to operate successfully in Ireland. We have co-operated very closely with customers, suppliers and legislators in relation to getting an agreed protocol for the provision of pay by weight”.
Well placed to assess current and indeed future trends in the sector, Murray identified the trend towards greater recovery of waste steams as one that will definitely continue to grow.
“It has become prohibitively expensive to simply put waste in the ground, so the operators are now investing in machinery to reduce their visits to landfill as much as possible. Composting is becoming more important with each passing year and technology is now reaching a point where it becomes profitable for the operators to go down this road”.
He added, “It is my belief that as it becomes more apparent to all players, both private and public that waste is valuable you will see higher and higher recovery rates in Ireland. A significant driver will be government targets as oppose to commodity prices of recovered materials.
One of the issues that remains highly charged is generating power from waste. My experience in Europe would lead me to believe that Ireland will have to look very seriously at this going forward, due to hugely increased energy costs. Plants are currently operating throughout Europe very successfully in urban environments. Cities like Barcelona have invested a lot and are now seeing the rewards particularly with the use of well proven technologies like Anaerobic Digestion”.
Murray speculates that Irish people would hardly believe the amount of Barcelona's waste that is converted to energy in a plant positioned at the end of the city’s promenade, right on the seafront!