Seonaid’s SLT Blog

Hello everyone,
 
I’ve really enjoyed the variety of things I’ve been able to do over the past few weeks. Here are two highlights below:
 
Last week we welcomed lots of work experience students into Pippbrook. We’re grateful to everyone who offered up their time to show them the wide range of interesting work we do across the council – from environmental health to customer services, property to HR, legal to communications and not forgetting IT to transformation – the feedback from the students was really encouraging and at least a few of the students are now looking to apply to work in MVDC because they enjoyed it so much – can’t get better feedback than that! We had two students (Sophie and Justin) with us in Evolve 2026 corner for two days. We asked them to help us identify a couple of young people personas (typical Mole Valley residents) and to identify what they would want from us in terms of services. Two great new ideas emerged that we probably wouldn’t have identified ourselves – one about introducing teenage voting ambassadors, and one to enable easier access for vulnerable young people to our grants and programmes. I was genuinely inspired by their energy and commitment to the task ?.
 
This week I visited the Leatherhead MRF (Material Recycling Facility) with Councillor Rosemary Hobbs and Piers. It was like a proper school trip (included the need to wear high vis and hard hats!) and I was fascinated by the huge scale of the machinery, how the material cleverly flowed through the system using new technologies to separate and batch, how they embraced continuous improvement to incrementally improve outcomes year on year (you know I’d like that one), and the neatness and scale of the outputs once all the recycled material was separated and sorted (some photos below).

I learned some interesting facts:
 
1)      Just one cube of combined plastics contains about 28,000 bottles. Each of the “paper” cubes weighs about a tonne and is starting to contain more Amazon wrapping than newspapers. They create a whole car park full of these cubes every week from Mole Valley, Elmbridge and Woking materials.
2)      Always separate out your recycling, even if it’s all going into one bin (i.e. don’t put tins and plastic inside cardboard boxes for example) as they can’t easily spot and separate them out at the facility. Oh, and don’t crush aluminium cans – they are really hard to pick out if they are flat as the machine is looking for 3D metal objects.
3)      There are new, emerging high-risk items being dumped in large numbers which can significantly disrupt the process – namely disposable vapes and small “fast gas” canisters (used as laughing gas). These are both considered hazardous (because they contain batteries and harmful gases) and require the team to stop the production line until they are removed.
 
We came away even more motivated to improve Mole Valley’s performance on recycling – which is timely as Surrey Environment Partnership (which we’re part of) has just formally launched the Rethink Waste programme across the county: http://www.greenredeem.co.uk/rethink-waste/. It encourages residents to learn how to be better recyclers, and as Mole Valley is currently sitting in the middle of the Surrey league table some healthy competition to get us to the top spot is always welcome! Let’s get that gold medal by the end of 2025.
 
By the time this blog is published we will have also held the new Council Strategy workshops, and I can’t wait to see how we align our Evolve 2026 strategies with the outputs of these workshops so that we have even clearer direction towards our change “north star” over the next few years.
 
I hope you all have a lovely weekend and if you’re going on a summer holiday, an enjoyable and restful break.
 
Seonaid