Examination of Witnesses (Questin Numbers
300-319)
MR ANDREW
KINSEY AND
MR JON
DE SOUZA
19 NOVEMBER 2008
Q300 Mr Drew: The numbers are actually
quite scary. Construction produces a third of all the waste stream
and you have got this ambition of a 50% reduction in landfill
by 2012. That leaves an awful lot of landfill needing to be found.
Are you ambitious enough as an industry?
Mr Kinsey: It is a good question
and we debated and we used the UK Government's strategy to try
and inform our own sustainability targets. We have a series of
targets on various things and one is waste, which looks at achieving
certain targets by 2010. In the case of waste initially we had
proposed a 50% reduction, so we were aiming to beat that strategy
by two years. Having had that debate internally amongst our project
teams, they felt that was not challenging enough and we wanted
to go a bit further. Actually, when you think about it, in the
position we occupy in the industry that is probably about right
because we should be able to go beyond whatever that kind of average
figure is, if you like, if that takes into account all the rest
of the industry. So our considered opinion is that probably the
target is kind of about right. Some will go a little bit beyond
that and we have signed up to the WRAP half waste to landfill
construction commitment, but some other parts of the industry
are going to struggle with some of that. It is also down to the
fact that perhaps some of the contractors out there, unlike us—we
are a national player—are more regionally based and we find
a great variation in our ability to recycle depending upon where
we operate in the country. We produced in 2007 around about 600,000
cubic metres of waste on all of our projects and about 60% of
that currently got recycled last year. So by reducing that by
70% we are aiming to only landfill then around about 12%.
Q301 Mr Drew: So if you can do it,
other people can do it as well?
Mr Kinsey: Yes, I think we have
to aim for that, otherwise we are not going to get anywhere.
Mr de Souza: That 50% target to
reduce waste to landfill by 2012 based on 2008 figures that sits
within the Strategy for Sustainable Construction is a sector-based
target and it does actually rely upon the larger organisations
to go above and beyond, and there are positive reasons for them
to do that. Firstly, it is a differentiator in the marketplace,
and secondly, I think there is increasing recognition within the
sector that good waste management practice is actually an opportunity
to save money. Certainly it is not a cost to the bottom line.
I think where there is difficulty is that the Strategy has not
possibly been promoted out to industry as widely as it might be
and that probably within the smaller end of the SME market people
probably are not just aware of it. They may not even be aware
that the target exists. Within our sector there are around a quarter
of a million companies and the vast majority of those employ less
than 10 people, and actually influencing those companies I think
is where the difficulty lies.
Q302 Mr Drew: In terms of who is
monitoring this—you immediately smile. That would suggest
that this is not an area of great success, because that is what
we are led to believe. Defra has a role. Who else has a role?
Mr Kinsey: There is a variety
of regulators in the environmental industry or the environmental
field, are there not, and I suppose the principal ones would be
the Environment Agency and possibly some local authorities. The
reason I smiled was that I think I have been working for the company
for just over nine years now and I have probably only seen an
Environment Agency officer on our sites less than four or five
times, that sort of figure.
Q303 Chairman: They will be round
now!
Mr Kinsey: We have a regular dialogue
with them on my current job! We have spoken to them about Site
Waste Management Plans and showing them what we are doing and
I am quite staggered really at their lack of interest in that.
Q304 Mr Drew: Why are they not interested?
Mr Kinsey: I am not too sure.
I think perhaps they have got other things they are looking at,
water pollution, and they obviously deal with some aspects of
waste, for example, waste exemptions on our sites. There is a
whole series of complicated pieces of laws which need to be policed.
Q305 Mr Drew: The reason I say that
is—and I have said this before to the Committee—I
have walked the waste chain and we looked at the dismantling of
motor vehicles, and I have to say that meeting some of the people
who do it they were pretty clear that the Environment Agency was
helpful, engaged, and that people were not cheating any more because
it just was not worth it. I am not saying there is not some cheating,
but given that you can recycle about 97% of a vehicle now and
there is money in it, you would be daft not to.
Mr Kinsey: Sure. I did not say
that they were unhelpful. They are very helpful when we see them.
It is just that if we compare them with the regime we have in
health and safety, we have much more regular inspections on health
and safety because the construction industry is deemed as a dangerous
industry. I think there is, quite rightly, a good focus from the
Environment Agency on the sorts of organisations you have just
described because they are at the coalface of dealing with waste
issues and waste companies which we use as waste contractors,
and transfer stations are not routinely audited by waste companies.
My point was really that we do not see them in construction. Maybe
this is because Site Waste Management Plans, et cetera, are quite
a new piece of legislation. We may well start to see them regularly
on our sites, I do not know, but I am just telling you the historical
picture.
Q306 Mr Drew: My final question:
in terms of monitoring and measurement this is self-enforced to
a large extent?
Mr Kinsey: In our company, I believe
so. We have quite a good regime now and it is a good lever for
us to improve the reporting. We use the BRE SMARTWaste system,
which is an online tool, so we have got a good visibility of what
is going on on all of our projects. BRE is the Building Research
Establishment. It is a former government agency.
Q307 Mr Drew: But again, this is
a worry in the sense that it is not necessarily that clear what
the figures really are?
Mr Kinsey: I think it is still
early days, to be fair, and we do not know quite how it is going
to pan out.
Mr de Souza: One of the concerns
which has been put across by our members is that actually there
is a number of different ways of actually measuring site waste.
They say it tends to be four different measures which are used,
which are based on volume and weight, by project value or by floor
area, so a two by two matrix, and there is not that consistent
methodology across the industry to enable proper benchmarking
of performance and to really ascertain the current level of performance
in the sector. For us, I think the most sensible approach would
be to measure by volume, but then there is a disconnect with the
way the Landfill Tax is charged. There actually may be a key role
for Government as a client, because the Government is responsible
for about 40% of construction spend in the country, to actually
mandate or strongly suggest one of those methodologies above and
beyond the others. We are working currently with WRAP, the Construction
Confederation, which brings together contracting bodies, the Construction
Products Association and other key industry stakeholders to work
to suggest an industry approach to measurement of site waste which
can be adopted across the board, but it will only be really truly
adopted if strong client leadership is shown to actually ensure
that those measures are the ones adopted across their projects.
Q308 Chairman: Can I just be clear
from my own understanding to put in context what you have said?
Site Waste Management Plans, are these formal documents which
have to be drawn up before you start developing a site?
Mr Kinsey: Yes. There was some
new legislation earlier in the year which requires that the client
must require one of these things and it is up to the principal
contractor, which is normally ourselves, to then develop that.
There are different formats for these things. I mentioned that
we used the BRE SMARTWaste, which is one form, but equally WRAP
has another form and there is nothing really to stop you developing
your own word document, if you like.
Q309 Chairman: But are they rigorous
in the sense that sometimes you have these statements of what
I call "best endeavours", "We will do our best
to recycle X per cent," or are they quite detailed documents
which act as a benchmark to the successful recycling or minimisation
of waste in the context of a particular project?
Mr Kinsey: Again, I can only speak
from our company's experience and we are trying to very much do
the latter, which is to make them a rigorous sort of process,
and that involves forecasting the amount of waste we think we
are going to create—and that is a pretty challenging process
at times because people have never been asked that question before—but
then also to monitor against that requirement as we go along with
the project. Another important aspect is to ensure that we have
full legal compliance with the duty of care to make sure we know
where our waste goes. That, incidentally, sometimes causes us
problems when we are looking at these sorts of smaller recycling
outlets because we cannot always be sure. Sometimes the legislation
seems to get in the way of some of that duty of care legislation.
We would like to reuse and recycle products, but we are being
told that that is now waste and therefore it comes under waste
management legislation.
Chairman: That is helpful.
Q310 David Taylor: Waste prices are
notoriously volatile, or can be. I can think back over the years
to having garages full of newspapers that nobody wanted for weeks
and then all of a sudden off they went. I saw in the Evening
Standard a fortnight ago that council collection companies
are struggling to shift mountains of paper and plastic, and so
on. I will put this question to Mr Kinsey first. How much of a
problem are falling prices for recycling within your industry?
Mr Kinsey: I think it can be a
problem. It does vary so much that it is difficult to talk about
specifics because it will probably be different next week, but
we tend to work with specialist waste companies and do deals with
them on specific waste materials.
Q311 David Taylor: Do you sell forward
in some ways? Do you ever get a committed price which they committed
to six months ago or twelve months ago, or is it just the market
price on the day?
Mr Kinsey: The waste contracts
are dealt with on a project by project basis at the moment, so
we do not have a coordinated approach company-wide. That is something
we have looked at, but because of the nature of our work and the
different types of projects we get involved with we need to be
flexible, basically, and a lot of the waste companies tend to
be quite regionally based rather than nationally based, as we
are. We are also looking at the supply of those materials, so
that is outside of our direct supply chain, but last year and
the year before we were involved in developing a recycled plastic
product that takes waste plastics, mixed chemical waste, and we
have been trialling that as a hoarding board, which we are very
keen to use, and the company is about to set up a full production
of that in the London Borough of Newham, I believe, in the very
near future. So we are exploring all these avenues all the time,
but the main way we interact with the waste industry is through
a waste company which tends to take that material and then recover
it for recycling. In some cases it will be direct to landfill,
but it is done on a project by project basis, so it is over the
timescale of those projects really that those deals are done.
Q312 David Taylor: Have you anything
to add to that, Mr de Souza?
Mr de Souza: No, just that our
members' response to that is in line with what Andrew said.
Q313 David Taylor: I have had a fair
amount of contact over recent years with the National Industrial
Symbiosis Programme and I quite like their concise definition
of waste as "simply a resource in the wrong place".
I think that is a very positive way of looking at it, but does
the industry at large look at it in that way? How can people like
yourselves working across the industry change the culture from
where they are at the moment to actually seeing waste as a real
valuable reusable resource?
Mr de Souza: That is something
which has been going on over a number of years and we try to work
across the industry to try and promote the actual business benefits
of looking at waste as a resource rather than as a cost to the
bottom line. We were involved in a project in London for 18 months
up until March 2008, which was known as CoRE, Construction Resource
Efficiency, and the purpose of that project was really to reach
out to those organisations which knew they had to do something
with waste but did not actually know where to start, and trying
to promote the opportunities of getting involved with some of
those government agencies like NISP, WRAP and like Envirowise
which touch on the environmental sustainability and specifically
the waste agenda. I think one of the difficulties our industry
has had is that it does not entirely understand the support landscape
that is out there, so who is best to turn to, is it WRAP, is it
Envirowise, and there is not an easy way for them to make that
decision. That is something which actually our programme in London
did do. Unfortunately, the funding for that ran out. It came from
the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme, which unfortunately
came to an end, but what I think there is probably room for within
our sector is a very simple portal for companies to visit, to
feed in their problems and to get a response, "If your problem
is X, you need to speak to Y."
Q314 David Taylor: What proportion
of the construction industry's GDP is actually produced by small
and medium sized enterprises which may lack the capacity to comply
with directives and urgings from central government?
Mr de Souza: Construction as a
whole is around 10% of GDP. It employs about two million people.
In terms of the number of organisations, the majority of that
percentage of GDP by value is delivered by the larger organisations.
I do not have the ratio.
Q315 David Taylor: But it is a sizeable
minority, the SMEs?
Mr de Souza: Yes.
Q316 David Taylor: Have you had contact
with NISP over the years?
Mr de Souza: Yes, we worked with
them on this CoRE project.
Q317 David Taylor: You work with
them all the time matching producers of materials where there
is a demand?
Mr de Souza: Yes.
Q318 David Taylor: Do you agree that
the construction industry could make more use of NISP? I do not
think NISP has always had the continuity of support from central
government and if you agree that it does not make sufficient use
of it, what can be done at the centre to encourage that?
Mr de Souza: Firstly, yes, I completely
agree that more businesses within the construction sector could
be using the services that NISP offers and I think there are two
approaches to increasing the uptake. Firstly, I think there is
still work to be done to market that service because I do not
believe many as a percentage of companies in our sector are aware
of what they do. Secondly, I think there is an opportunity for
the actual service which NISP offers to be tailored more to our
sector where at the moment it relies upon a certain quantity of
waste coming off a particular site from a particular waste stream
before NISP is actually able to put that through the system and
if we can find some way within a local area of looking at a number
of sites all producing similar waste which can be collected in
some sort of milk round, then I think more companies within our
sector would take up that service.
Q319 David Taylor: This is an add-on
question before I pass you back to the Chairman. In relation to
the biggest construction project in Britain, I believe in Europe,
the Olympic site, have special arrangements been made by the ODA
or any other organisation for the waste streams arising from that
site?
Mr de Souza: Can I pass that over
to Mr Kinsey?
Mr Kinsey: I am actually not directly
involved with the ODA, although I do work on the Athletes' Village,
but for various commercial sensitivities -
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