Examination of Witnesses (Questions 788-799)
Mr Cal Bailey, Mr Chris Sexton, Ms Lesley Seymour
and Mr Rainer Zimmann
6 MAY 2008
Q788Chairman: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Perhaps we could start as we did before. Mr Zimmann, could you
introduce yourself and we will work our way along the line?
Mr Zimmann: Good morning, my name is Rainer
Zimmann; I work for a company called Ove Arup and Partners. We
are a multidisciplinary engineering consultancy and business consultancy.
I am a civil and environmental engineer by training, and I have
been working with the construction industry for 12 years, specifically
on construction waste and waste management in general.
Ms Seymour: I am Lesley Seymour. I am a chartered
civil engineer as well and Chairman of the Institution of Civil
Engineers in the southwest. I have recently joined Buro Happold
as an Associate, working in their sustainability and advanced
technology group and the referenced information I will talk about
today was done in a previous role.
Mr Sexton: My Lord, I am Chris Sexton; I am
Head of Engineering at Laing O'Rourke. Laing O'Rourke is the biggest
privately owned construction company in the UK—30,000 employees
and a group turnover of about £4 billion. I have been with
Laing O'Rourke only for four months; previously I was Head of
Engineering in the Army.
Mr Bailey: Good morning, my Lords. I am Cal
Bailey; I am the Marketing and Sustainability Director of NG Bailey,
one of the UK's largest building services firms, and by building
services we interpret that very broadly: mechanical and electrical
engineering, that is the services—the heating, the cooling,
the lighting and the power in buildings. Also the ICT, where we
have done a lot of work and we have extended our work recently
to include the floors and partitions and ceilings because that
interfaces very heavily with our services—we look after
the building then throughout its life, during the maintenance
period as well. We do a lot of offsite construction for reasons
which we may turn to in due course.
Q789 Chairman: We are going to start
this morning by going over ground that we have been over before,
and you will have heard some of the responses given. This is about
the data relating to the amounts of construction waste from materials,
et cetera. The first question is do we have enough data? Who are
the greatest contributors of waste and does it come from new builds,
demolition or refurbishment? What is your take on the difference
between, let us say, civil engineering and construction as contributors?
So a wide range of questions you might not all wish to answer,
but who would like to start?
Mr Sexton: My Lord, in terms of the data—and
I think hitherto the data has not been particularly good—I
think there has only been a requirement to report hazardous data
and there have been no regulatory mechanisms for measuring waste
data, and some of it has relied on visual estimates and so on.
As you heard in the previous session, even the site waste management
plans do not require that waste data to be reported upwards and
outwards at the moment, although we would be quite happy if it
was. The answer to your first question, my Lord, is that hitherto
the data has been weak and we are certainly going forward undertaking
benchmarking exercises so that in the future we will know very
accurately what our waste data is going forward, but I am afraid
looking backwards the picture is slightly opaque.
Q790 Chairman: So we are around about
year zero plus one?
Mr Sexton: I think we are slightly better than
that in that we started this process a few years ago, but it is
very much the start of the journey, I think.
Q791 Lord Bhattacharyya: There are some
reports which suggest that as much as 30% of the total weight
of materials on site is wasted. Is it an accurate figure? Is it
credible?
Mr Sexton: I think that the 30% does not refer
to the total waste from a site and that figure is likely to be
much lower. But we do not have the completely accurate data yet.
Q792 Lord Bhattacharyya: So these reports
are not very credible then?
Mr Sexton: I do not think the 30% figure is
correct.
Q793 Lord Howie of Troon: Good man! Well
done!
Mr Bailey: I would like to analyse waste in
a slightly different way, ways which the Committee may wish to
take up or may not. We talked about the sources of waste in the
analysis from demolition, construction and refurbishment and so
on. The analysis I propose would be to do with what I initially
called construction error—to do with over ordering, damage
in transit, damage on site, the errors that people make on site;
secondly, poor planning, which happens before site, which is to
do with inadequate planning and incomplete design, and that leads
to quite different sorts of waste through work ripped out then
put in again in some different form, over-engineering, poor use
of innovation, inadequate time to do proper planning logistics—for
example all kinds of areas of waste there. Thirdly, what I call
lifetime impacts to do with, for example, if one was to very poorly
manufacture or construct a building it might be highly draughty
and the need for air tightness testing would dramatically improve
the energy performance of that building over its life, for example.
Finally, packaging waste is of a different order altogether—that
is caused by manufacturers—and that would be the fourth
category of waste and it seems to me that one needs to analyse
the causes of waste quite carefully in order really to understand
how to solve these problems.
Q794 Lord Bhattacharyya: So if you are
taking the total system from beginning to end what would be your
estimate regarding waste?
Mr Bailey: I am not going to give you an overall
estimate for each of those areas; I have some data on some areas
and in terms of the areas I am most interested in—and which
you may consider this panel most expert in—is the area of
planning and design. We have undertaken a project recently in
which—and this is definitely in the status of an art and
not a science at this stage—it seems to me highly possible
to reduce by orders of magnitude the amount of time it takes to
construct projects. I have one very good example of a couple of
large hospitals with which we are involved, where by accident
the time table to commencement of the project was two years longer
than necessary—about two years longer than originally planned,
I should say. That was caused by delays to a PFI project—the
kind of delays one might be very familiar with—and we decided
not to just park the project but to continue with design, which,
looking back, we are very pleased we did. We were very fortunate
to be in this chain, which was highly supportive, highly integrated,
and the result was a project for which we lost 40% labour on site
and completed nine months early. I think that was an example of
huge waste in process which I would put substantially down to
poor planning and poor design. If they are done properly substantial
costs can come out.
Ms Seymour: Taking civil engineering waste,
which is the area that I studied. We found very little public
information, and taking Lord Howie's point the classification
of construction and demolition waste, once you break down those
numbers and look at that demolition waste there is a high percentage
of reuse incorporated in that 30%. I think if we talk about waste
in construction we should be clear about the reuse component that
people are already taking forward and what they are doing. Certainly
there is a lack of data in terms of what other panel members have
talked about. Site waste management plans I think are going to
help with that, but the knock-on effect of that is there is a
lack of benchmark data; so, say, per metre squared of road construction
or bridge construction, of that type of order. I think in setting
targets we probably need to look more at the process and what
is a realistic target rather than setting an arbitrary target
based around the feel good factor number around reducing waste,
because in some projects the 20% reduction could be quite innovative
and in other projects it could be quite simple.
Q795 Lord Howie of Troon: I repeat that
I am a Fellow of ICE and in the past I have been well acquainted
with Arup, Buro Happold and Laing's. I do not know where O'Rourke
came from! I was a designer when I used to work. To what extent
do architects, designers and engineers work together to consider
waste reduction? They did not do it in my day—I am talking
about now?
Mr Sexton: Picking up on the point that my colleague
Mr Bailey made before, there is the whole process from design
through to decommissioning and in my view the opportunities for
reducing and managing waste are very heavily weighted at the start.
So in answer to your question we do get together now with clients
and designers; we have a scheme called Building Constructive Relationships,
of which some of my colleagues here are a part, to get together,
to get contractors, designers and the client all together, and
that gives you the really big opportunities to design out the
waste. If I might say so, in the previous session there was a
lot of concentration of what happens when you get on to the site.
The die is to a certain extent cast by that stage and there are
numerous things which you can do jointly at the design stage to
design out waste, and Mr Bailey has mentioned one of them, which
is offsite manufacture. If you can design all the components of
whatever you are building offsite and manufacture them offsite
and then move them to the site then many of the causes of waste
which you heard about earlier, such as the logistics, storing
too many things, damage to things on site and so on and so forth,
simply do not occur; and in my view that is where we should be
focusing our attention, at the front end.
Mr Zimmann: I am from a design background so
I completely agree with that. I would like to make a point rather
about site waste management plans as well. The wording of that
suggests that it actually starts on site but the intention was
to start at planning and pre-design stage to get the clients thinking
about it and getting a vision out for reducing waste and being
resourceful. The work that we have done together with waste with
Arup on plasterboard, for instance, has shown that by involving
the whole design team the architects and the suppliers of materials
is where you get the maximum benefit in terms of reducing waste
in the design process. So it is an integrated profile rather than
an individual profile.
Ms Seymour: The Institution of Civil Engineers
prepared a demolition protocol that has been used that is very
much at the early planning stages, and we do often forget the
demolition part of the contract which is quite an important bit
to add in.
Q796 Lord Haskel: The Sustainable Development
Commission suggests that the use of construction materials is
characterised by what they call a linear process: extraction,
manufacture, assembly, construction, maintenance, refurbishment,
demolition and then disposal. In many industries now they have
what they call a "cradle to cradle" approach, a closed-loop
approach where by the time the use has come to an end you can
recycle it. Is there any approach made in construction to try
and convert this linear process into a cradle to cradle progress?
Mr Zimmann: I think we are progressing towards
that development by trying to set our secondary material markets,
which I think is one of the key elements. We talked about take-
back schemes where multiple suppliers are looking at producer
responsibility and actually bringing it back into the production
cycle to have actually a closed-loop approach. But that also obviously
means that clients, developers, designers who specify materials
have to actually select materials that have a certain amount of
recycled content in them to create the demand for those sorts
of materials, which are better for the environment ultimately.
Then we also need to have enough invested in the infrastructure
to create and take out this secondary arm of the waste chain and
then supply them back into the production cycle. So it is a multi-factorial
approach to this supply and demand model really.
Q797 Lord Haskel: Are technologies being
developed to facilitate all of these things?
Mr Zimmann: I think there is a lot of work being
done to increase awareness, educate people who specify materials,
and clients, to set up protocols to encourage people to produce
materials, which is a product specifying its quality requirements.
Where we are lacking at the moment is whether we actually have
enough processing capacity to create that and the availability
of markets for those products. The previous panel mentioned treatment
hubs, for instance—it has been thought through for contaminated
soils, but equally that could be done for secondary aggregate,
and that would, I think, also help the SMEs to take some of their
materials and actually get the mixed waste and sort it and separate
the materials out again, which can be done with high efficiency.
Q798 Lord Haskel: So it is a matter of
will rather than technology?
Mr Zimmann: I think the technology is there,
that is not the problem here.
Ms Seymour: The point I want to make on that
is the chain of responsibility as to it not being linear; it has
to be looped as well. That is something they are trying to produce
for the site waste management plans, that everybody takes responsibility
and that responsibility carries on down through that process rather
than stopping with the first person and not handed on. So I think
that is something that we really need to consider. Equally, I
have seen site waste management starting to become a dominant
service provision, so there are actually groups and organisations
that are setting themselves up purely to manage on site waste
and getting involved with trying to do trying to do resource efficiency,
and to my mind they seem to be very successful in it, so certainly
people are making a market opportunity, both out of innovation
and taking responsibility across various different sections.
Mr Sexton: The short answer to your question
is that it does not have to be linear, and this rather goes back
to the previous point about the design stage being absolutely
critical. My colleague mentioned specification. At Heathrow Terminal
5 we used 80,000 tonnes of recycled aggregates and 30% of the
concrete used pulverised fuel ash, which is a substitute for cement.
We have a PFI hospital up in Staffordshire where all the kerbstones
are being made not of concrete but recyclable material. This just
plays back into the previous thing, that the opportunities to
make it a non-linear process are all up in the design stage.
Q799 Earl of Selborne: The new eco-towns
offer the opportunity to conduct whole system design and so remove,
reduce and recycle construction waste in ways that would not be
available to single build projects. What techniques might be available
to use in these projects and what would need to be in the specification
to encourage such waste reduction?
Mr Bailey: Can I take that from an energy point
of view, but I am not completely convinced that the Committee
wishes to view energy as a type of waste? To me if you heat a
building once why does it not stay hot—every time you heat
it or cool it thereafter you are wasting energy, and energy is
clearly part of a global loop, a planetary loop, looked at holistically.
Looking at this from an energy point of view I would suggest that
this is an opportunity to build, if you are building a huge project,
greater varieties of energy sources and reduce reliance on the
grid, to recycle water, for example, to recycle high grade heat,
low grade heat within swimming baths and domestic hot water, for
example—huge opportunities to consider eco-towns as single
loops for energy. And whilst not the total story—we are
not talking about materials that much at all—but I think
it is a very significant opportunity from an energy point of view.
Also to add to the security of energy supply, that is going to
become an issue in the UK, we believe, and obviously to obtain
energy from various sources, not purely the grid, for example.
I will let my colleagues talk about materials.
Mr Sexton: Eco-towns I think offer fantastic
opportunities to start a town from scratch, which is something
that we do not normally have because they normally emerge, and
opportunities for collaboration. I think there are some challenges
as well. For instance, how you plan and lay down the base infrastructure
for the town, how you do that commercially is something which
I think is not yet clear. But the sorts of opportunities and benefits
which could arise are the ability to recycle waste between different
projects in the same town, where you are cutting and filling,
you can balance that around the whole of the town so that the
net arisings are nil. You can specify common materials around
the whole of the towns and that will cut down your waste because
what you did not use on one you could use on the other. I think
if we were involved in it, again the modern methods of construction
and offsite manufacture would feature very largely, so we would
produce the components for this eco-town offsite and then bring
them on to site, reducing labour, reducing plant, reducing time,
reducing noise and so on and so forth. So I think there is a bit
of a way to go yet but there are huge opportunities in eco-towns.
Ms Seymour: My thoughts are probably more based
around the actual construction activity of the eco-towns whilst
they are under development, and I take a point that was made earlier;
I think that if you delimited the whole site as being a waste
free zone so that nothing goes off the site, effectively, in terms
of landfill, that might be a good approach to start with, thinking
from that concept that in the construction activity you can constrain
it. Thinking about the tender packages—this is before you
get to site—it would be foolish not to link some of the
tender packages so that the pre-construction works and the post-construction
works were linked so there was opportunity to cross transfer waste
between demolition and construction activities. Certainly you
would need to set aside space on the site for that sort of work
to go on, and certainly you would need different types of requirements
from the planning body in order to store waste material on the
sites for reuse, so the consideration would be needed at quite
an early holistic stage to turn them into true eco-towns from
their construction. But I think it is all doable.
Mr Zimmann: I am currently involved in the bidding
for an eco-town development as part of a collaborative approach
for a developer and I think that eco-towns should be exemplars
really for resource efficiency and should be used as such. There
are a few points that we discussed earlier, starting with an earlier
vision in the master planning process of actually saying, "Waste
actually matters, we want to design it out, and the amount that
we cannot design we have to manage in a very sustainable way."
I think it needs a team of clients, developers, architects, designers,
constructors, that share this vision and actually set objectives
and targets for reducing waste, for reuse and recycling and also
commit themselves to monitor that through the whole process and
see how things are going. In terms of modern methods of construction,
I think without that it would be a failure from the start, really.
Also looking at constructional logistics, how materials are delivered
to the site and having a construction consolidation centre, for
instance, that will assist during the construction phase, but
later on when it becomes operational to use that as well as a
facility. Clearly having some way of processing the materials
will need to be at those construction consolidation centres as
well. So it is a fantastic opportunity to realise something in
the country where you have, as was said, a blank canvas to start
from, more or less.
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