Strong commitment and leadership is essential across the engineering/construction supply chain to tap the enormous potential of civil engineering to protect the environment and promote sustainable development.
Actions were identified to encourage sustainability and to address climate change, with major clients, governments and civil engineering organisations.
Sustainable Procurement
CIRIA have released a Guide to Sustainable Procurement in Construction (C695) which is being widely referred to with about 1000 accesses per quarter from across the private and public sectors. There have also been a number of ICE journal articles on sustainable procurement.
CEEQUAL continues to provide guidance on improving the environmental performance of civil engineering projects. To date it has been used on 110 completed projects and is currently being used on a further 210 projects; in total CEEQUAL is assessing over £17bn of civil engineering work. The CEEQUAL methodology has also been adapted to enable its use on international projects and on term maintenance works.
Regulation and guidance from Government includes:
- the British Standards Institution (BSI) standards BS8903 on the principles and framework for procuring sustainably
- the release of Publicly Available Specification 91 (PAS91) a specification for pre-qualification criteria in the construction industry developed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and BSI
- a number of commercial pre-qualification and accreditation tools such as Achilles – Building Confidence
Corporate Responsibility
Corporate Responsibility is now widely seen as a means to provide companies with a distinct commercial advantage, a benefit rather than a cost.Many engineering companies are now looking closely at who they work with up and down the supply chain for those who share similar values and working practices, often sharing common training, processes and practices.
CECA’s Corporate Responsibility Toolkit was published in 2008 and was circulated to all 300 CECA members and others in the supply chain. Their Environmental Strategy and Action Plan REF was published in January 2011 and is being used to collect data on a range of environmental issues.Benchmarks are being determined against which CECA members can measure and compare their own performance.
The ICE also held workshops on Corporate Responsibility in 2010 and have published journal articles on Corporate Responsibility reporting.
The adoption of responsible sourcing certification by construction product manufacturers has been made possible by the publication of BES6001.
Climate Change
Actions taken to address climate change and reduce CO2 include CECA’s publication of Carbon in Construction – a guidance document which was circulated to all CECA members and others in the supply chain. It is updated periodically and is freely available on the CECA website.
In May 2010 the ICE launched the State of the Nation report on Low Carbon Infrastructure, which led to the ICE being asked to contribute to the IGT report on low carbon construction. In addition, the BSI publicly available specification PAS 2050 is aimed to help produce credible assessments of the carbon footprints associated with goods or services over their lifetimes.