Waste Strategy for England 2007 - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questin Numbers 289-299)

MR ANDREW KINSEY AND MR JON DE SOUZA

19 NOVEMBER 2008

  Chairman: Can I welcome Bovis Lend Lease in the shape of Mr Andrew Kinsey and from Constructing Excellence Mr Jon de Souza, the Director of Member Services. You are both very welcome and our questions are going to be started by David Drew.

  Q289 Mr Drew: Can I start with something which in a sense has been a critical background to my entry to this? The reclamation industry, is that your equivalent of recycling and do you see it as such? Do you badge it as such? The reason I ask is because I have got a friend who is making rather a lot of money in reclamation and he is adamant that the building industry can reclaim much more than it does at the moment. Where do you see reclamation?

  Mr Kinsey: Yes, I think it is part of the story. Certainly on the demolition side of the process, I think that has done quite well. We have got projects we have worked on like Unilever House near Blackfriars Bridge, where there were lots of building elements which were reclaimed and recovered. There was a whole lecture theatre which was taken to the Isle of Wight, for example. It depends really what you mean by "reclamation" as well. We have also taken up parquet flooring and it is now part of the tables in our head office, for example. When you are looking at mainstream construction I think it might be a slightly different story because that is building materials and waste. So there are definite differences between those two parts of the industry, I think.

  Q290  Mr Drew: So given there is some reservation still in the building industry about the degree which can be reused—we are talking about demolition and we will come on to perhaps the more mainstream in a minute—what is it that the building industry needs to actually be encouraged to reuse more of its material?

  Mr de Souza: There are some examples of organisations out there which are designed to help the sector and other sectors for reuse of materials, and I believe it has come up in a previous evidence session, the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme, which looks to match up material coming off a particular site, for example, or from other industries and find examples of where that material may be used, to stop it going to landfill essentially, and that does not just operate in construction, it operates across sectors and there are some very good examples of where that approach has been used with our industry for particular materials to be used in, let us say, community work. So if a great deal of timber is coming off a construction site, they will find a local use for it nearby. So that is an example of good practice. I think one of the issues may be that some of the opportunities which are out there for the reuse of materials are not well-known or well-publicised.

  Q291  Mr Drew: Could you take us through those, because obviously what we are interested in is how do you bulk up the recycling in this industry, what are these methods, because clearly the alternative is landfill currently? We might come on to a third one, but let us say the main alternative is landfill. What other ways are there of recycling building materials other than putting it into landfill, the alternative for landfill? Let us put aside burning it and whatever else. Let us look at recycling first.

  Mr de Souza: There are things like the opportunities for crushing materials for use on, let us say, road aggregates, the opportunities to refill trenches.

  Mr Kinsey: I think from our perspective the problem is normally time. If you have got time to identify what those materials might be and then be able to have something to do with those materials, then we are able to recover them much more successfully. Again going back to the example of Unilever House, we did a sort of pre-demolition audit, which is quite a rare thing, I think, in the industry but it enabled us to identify what wastes were likely to crop up. Normally in a typical situation the problem is we need to get rid of it tomorrow, or probably even yesterday, and there is not the time or the space to be able to find either a user or a market for that material.

  Q292  Mr Drew: One of my major sites is being redeveloped at the moment. The developer made a great play to me to say that there were very few lorry loads of material which actually left the site. They have reused virtually all the material. They said a lot of it was messy and had to be treated. Why is that not more commonplace?

  Mr Kinsey: I think it is down to the whole way the construction industry works and the planning of the projects. You have to understand how we get involved in different contracts. Sometimes we are involved in, say, PFI or projects like the one I am involved in currently where we are much more involved in the design processes and we have a little bit more time.

  Q293  Mr Drew: So who should be being lent on in a sense to make sure the contracts do take account of your skills? We know that the costs of landfill are rising.

  Mr Kinsey: It is not necessarily who, it is the point in time when it needs to be addressed and in lots of contract types we come in far too late in the process. The design is done and we are there effectively just procuring that as a sort of construction management type of operation. You have very little influence at that particular point in time to do anything, so it is at the appropriate sort of RIBA stage and it needs to start with the design team really about designing out waste, and we have conversations with our design teams when we are involved with those sorts of processes about some of those principles, the principles of design for deconstruction and eliminating waste at the design process. That is the good practice sort of approach, to not even produce the waste in the first place. It follows the waste hierarchy. So I think the client probably could get a lot more involved in this. At the moment we have Site Waste Management Plans. The client has to require us to produce one of these things, but that is probably about as far as it goes. When we come into the projects a bit later on, if we have not had that involvement in the design then a lot of that waste is going to occur.

  Q294  Mr Drew: So without putting words in your mouth, it is crucial that the client and the contractor work together from the onset of a site which is obviously going to be cleared and reused?

  Mr Kinsey: Yes, and the design team as well, and having some of those early contractor involvements as well, because it is the trades ultimately that create the waste. They manage the sorts of problems. Those problems are all designed in. They can either be designed in or designed out, so it is linking those things a lot better together.

  Q295  Mr Drew: On that, we all use the paraphrase "brownfield first" but what is the tax regime in terms of making that a sensible way to develop our country and how should it be changed to make it even more advantageous for you to use existing sites with existing materials?

  Mr Kinsey: I was involved in the redevelopment of a brownfield site for a hospital in Romford not long ago and we did benefit from Landfill Tax exemptions, but I have to say it was not an easy process.

  Q296  Mr Drew: But you can get those. Take us through quickly the process.

  Mr Kinsey: We have to obviously identify the fact that the site was contaminated and what extent the contamination was, and prove that the excavation or the treatment processes that we were carrying out were not just going to happen anyway because of the works that were going on but that they were being done to remediate the site. So we use a technique called cement/lime stabilisation, which helped to save the material on the site and it cost us about, I think, £30,000 but we estimate there was a quarter of a million pounds saving by not having to excavate and dispose of that material somewhere and then bring some new material back in. So there are some cost benefits, but again it comes back down to time. Some contaminated sites are very difficult to treat and if it needs, say, bioremediation we may not be able to have time in the programme to wait around eight weeks, or 12 weeks, or however long that process takes. The cost of that time is more than the cost of taking it away and landfilling it effectively. So the Landfill Tax is an interesting kind of regulatory regime and the increases we have seen recently are starting to focus minds a little bit more.

  Q297  Mr Drew: Do you welcome that?

  Mr Kinsey: I think it is the right kind of thing. Maybe historically it has been a bit too low. It was interesting that in 2005, when we had the Hazardous Waste Regulations introduced that saw a lot of the hazardous waste landfill, supply of that hazardous waste landfill, rapidly diminish and that increased prices substantially as well. So all these things, I think, come into play to help us as an industry recover, recycle. It makes the economic argument a lot stronger.

  Q298  David Lepper: Just a small point. As it is social enterprise we have to put in a plug for the excellent wood recycling project based in my Brighton constituency, which won awards for its work! Would a relatively small project like that serving a local area figure on your radar? Is it part of a network that you would be aware of?

  Mr de Souza: We are a member-based organisation. We have 268 members from across the supply chain and they tend to come from the leading edge companies, so they tend to be the large/medium sized contractors, larger design practices, national client bodies. We do have also a network of regional partners who work very much at a regionally based level, one in each of the English RDA regions, and they would be probably aware of something at that sort of level.

  Q299  Mr Williams: Nowadays many products are actually designed with the end of life in view so that they can be easily recyclable. Is the construction industry looking at that in any way, designing buildings? I pick up the point made by David Lepper about wood. So much wood is not recycled because it has been treated with such noxious compounds that it is almost unsafe to handle, whereas if a little bit of thought had gone into it, it could have been treated with something which would have achieved the purpose but without making it difficult to recycle. Are you designing buildings with end of life in view nowadays?

  Mr Kinsey: We do not necessarily design buildings ourselves. We work with design teams which do that and they either work for the client directly or in some cases we are effectively the client, so that is an important distinction. I think certainly projects where we have PFI involvement, where we have got this responsibility for the building in its life cycle, those things are certainly starting to be looked at a lot more. Some of the more forward thinking clients we work with are quite keen on those processes as well. They are not just interested in the capital cost of the product but the end of the life cycle and how long it lasts. I think tools like BREEAM or the Code for Sustainable Homes now are quite useful and they have some aspects of lifecycle. I am not sure it is entirely correct yet, but at least those tools are out there. So I think these things are becoming more and more on the agenda. It depends on the designers at the end of the day to specify the materials correctly. We kind of look at it from two aspects. One is a sort of prohibited and referable materials list, things we either ban or would like to ban but cannot because of various materials. Sometimes these are materials which are the only thing to use, but we are trying to avoid the use of those products. There is also a sort of green list, if you like, of materials, things we would like to promote such as FSC certified timber, for example, or materials with a high recycle content. On the project I am working with we have worked previously with WRAP on looking at the percentage of recycled content by the value of the building and the client on my current project has a target or an aspiration to achieve 20%. So we are responding to those sorts of things.

  Mr de Souza: Absolutely. In our membership we have seen design for deconstruction rather than demolition, which gives opportunities then for further use for recyclable materials. I would just like to echo Andrew's point about procuring materials on a whole life basis rather than a lowest capital cost basis. Two of my colleagues gave evidence to the BERR Select Committee on construction and actually the final message they both put across to that group was that they would like to see an increase in clients procuring on a whole life cost basis, on a whole life value basis, and I would like to echo that point myself.

  Mr Kinsey: I think another important point is that we can only really speak for our particular position in the industry and we work particularly a lot with repeat clients, who are in the main blue chip organisations who have quite a strong interest in this. What you have to remember is that there is a whole ream of the industry out there which works for one-off clients. I have been one of those myself when I had a house extension and I talked to the contractor about waste and I could have been talking Japanese, quite frankly. He really could not understand why I was interested in reducing waste, "Well, it just goes in the skip, doesn't it?" So there is a whole conversation and awareness raising at that kind of level of the industry which I think needs a bit more action.



 
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