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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