The meters are tough to dispose of, as they contain a mix of materials including encapsulated lithium batteries.
Teams from across M Group鈥檚 Water and Transport businesses worked together to identify a safe, compliant and sustainable solution 鈥� with M Group鈥檚 expertise across a broad range of sectors proving invaluable on a project of this scale. Following a year-long review involving more than 40 organisations, M Group selected Yorkshire-based specialist Areera to process the meters.
The process enables component materials to be recovered and reused, including plastics and ferrous and non-ferrous metals, while also creating opportunities to recover small quantities of precious and finite materials from printed circuit boards.
Liam Saddler, smart network delivery director at M Group, said, 鈥淩eaching 200,000 meters is a significant milestone and demonstrates that we now have a sustainable solution capable of supporting much larger volumes during AMP8.
鈥淭he challenge was to find an approach that was safe, compliant and practical while also delivering better environmental outcomes. By bringing expertise together from across M Group and working closely with our supply chain, we have created a solution that can now be scaled across our metering programmes.鈥�
The programme is being developed to handle increasing volumes, with automation, robotics and AI all being explored to improve processing capacity and data capture.
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