Greater Cambridge Shared Waste

The Greater Cambridge Shared Waste Commercial team is your local partner to help you with all your recycling and waste needs.

Our aim is to help you:

• Save money from the unavoidable production of rubbish
• Help you recycle as much as possible
• Reduce your businesses impact on the environment by helping you make greener choices

The shared waste service is a strategic partnership between Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council – two names that are well known, trusted and been providing a commercial collection service for decades.

Our specialist team are passionate about recycling and will know how you can cut the amount of waste you produce and by recycling more save money.

We pride ourselves on providing a high-quality service – we are certified to international environmental standards – and being open and transparent on pricing. There are no hidden charges such as administration for legal documents you must have, bin rental or to replace a bin if it is damaged.

We generate our own green energy
We recently installed solar panels on top of our depot. These panels generate clean, renewable energy that provides around a quarter of our building’s electricity. Proposals for a solar farm to power electric bin lorries have been included in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority’s latest budget plans.

Our trucks

We have a fleet of new, fuel-efficient vehicles with the cleanest engines on the market.

The Greater Cambridge Shared Waste Service has also bought an electric bin lorry. The service will be one of the first nationally to have one of the green vehicles which have zero emissions and contribute to better air quality when out on the road. Full details of the electric bin lorry can be viewed on the South Cambridgeshire District Council's press release - Councils take green drive onto the streets with arrival of first all-electric bin lorry.

Minimising your waste

We’ll help you to identify where your business can cut down on the amount of waste that it’s generating, saving you money and benefiting the environment.

Lowering your carbon footprint
With our local depot, sorting and disposal facilities and connections with regional waste re-processors, we make sure your recycling and waste is transported as few miles by road as possible.

Real, local environmental benefits

We re-invest the profits from our service into local Council initiatives that benefit the Greater Cambridge environment, such as community litter-picks, fly-tipping removal and recycling education campaigns.

We look after your waste

Your general waste, recyclable waste and food waste is all taken to the Waste Management Park at Waterbeach. This is a state-of-the-art plant that makes sure your recycling is sorted into different types, ready to be made into new products. Your general waste passes through a treatment process that salvages as much of it for recycling as possible, albeit at a lower quality, reducing the amount sent to landfill. Finally, your food waste is processed into soil-improver, which is available for use locally by farmers and residents.

We are giving practical support to the Cambridge Food Hub and their Green Coffee Shop scheme. We are supplying the Food Hub with free caddies that are being used to collect and transport used coffee grounds. The Food Hub collects them from local coffee shops and takes them to bio-bean, a clean tech firm at Alconbury which manufactures biofuels and biochemicals from spent coffee grounds. Shops that are part of the Green Coffee Shop scheme are entitled to a discount in their commercial waste collection.