No Waste

Managing Sustainability in Construction

Uly Ma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351914475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Agricoltura sostenibile

Sustainability is a critical issue for the construction industry. In the short term, sustainability is often seen as a 'must do' item. In the longer term, all contractors will be seeing it as a source of competitive advantage. Public sector construction, infrastructure and other large projects such as the Thames Gateway and the Olympics in 2012 are all being driven down this route by pressure from Government. Uly Ma's No Waste is an extremely practical guide to managing sustainability in construction that draws on input from all the related stakeholders: the construction industry itself, the clients, designers and architects and the trades. The book explores how the industry can transform itself from business as before to business as it should be, from the micro level of good site practices to setting the right policies that drives a company onwards. The text covers the management of sustainability and the accompanying CD ROM includes a wealth of material such as tool kits, templates and activities that can be shared throughout the organisation and used for team meetings, communication and training.

PART 1
Talking About
Sustainability

1
Sustainability and All That

What is Sustainability?

Murray Coleman, former CEO of Bovis Lend Lease, told me that one problem in raising sustainability awareness is that sustainability has many different definitions and aspects. Because sustainability has different meanings to different people, then with over 1 million people working in UK’s construction sector, we can estimate that there are probably 1 million different definitions of sustainability or so! So what? Nobody really worries about what construction workers think, do they? Well, Murray does and so do many in our industry. Because many of these definitions stir the emotions, then it can lead to contentious discussions, shouting matches, protests and other disagreements. In other words, whatever you are doing in sustainability, there is a good chance that someone else reckons you are doing it wrong! This does not help our industry going forward.

However, to many companies, sustainability is a much simpler issue. Sustainability, you see, is the new ‘black’. In the fashion world, every season has a new ‘black’ colour or style that rapidly becomes a ‘must-have’ item. Sustainability therefore becomes a must-have element in every organisation’s management objectives. Does this matter? Many of my colleagues feel that sustainability should be taken more seriously, but according to Wilfried Wang, architect and professor at the University of Texas, ‘sustainability is a cultural problem, embedded in unsuitable lifestyles’.¹ In other words, maybe having sustainability as the new black is one way to get people to change their lifestyle.

Being the new black has some advantages and disadvantages. The positives are that many projects that ‘do-good’ instead of making a profit are also approved by companies. It also opens up corporate thinking from a narrow focus on money to broader issues. However, it also introduced us to political correctness, greenwash² and a host of other ‘emotional claptrap’. Most of all, we also realised that sustainability is not just the new black, the desirable must-have for this season, it is also the 600 pound gorilla sitting in the room. You cannot help but notice it, you cannot walk around it and whatever you do will involve it.

What is Driving All This?

Over the past decade, there has been increasing debate about the increases in global temperature. Depending on your view point, climate change is either an oncoming environmental and ecological disaster or a conspiracy among certain politicians, scientists and pressure groups. Of course, if you are sceptical, you may figure it to be something with a bit of both extremes included.

The approach most of us adopt towards climate change depends a lot on what we know or are able to find out. Unfortunately the science of climate studies is a difficult subject,³ so we rely on what the media and commentators tell us and the media reports in 2010 about scientific integrity on climate change⁴ certainly do not help matters. We have at one extreme the authority of the 600-page report⁵ and at the other end there is the sensational headlines in the free morning newspaper.

I found reading all this quite difficult (and no, I did not read the whole of the 600-page Stern Review). Neither the technical terms in one nor the breathless prose in the other really informs me or helps me make useful business decisions. In fact, to a pragmatic business professional, it should not really matter whether we believe it or doubt it. The hard facts are that we have to deal with the reality of the situation – sustainability is here to stay. We have to deal with new legislation and manage the expectations of society because sustainability is rapidly becoming a licence to do business.

To a professional, deciding about climate change will often include an element of doing something about it. And to do that effectively, we need a clear definition for sustainability that makes sense in the workplace.

Defining Sustainability

So we reckon we all know about sustainability: it is desirable as well as unavoidable. But what is it?

Well, the Oxford Dictionaries⁶ say:

sustainable

Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level: sustainable economic growth

sustainability

A concept that is used to describe community and economic development in terms of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

The second definition is the one most people think about then they consider sustainability. Nevertheless, even though this appears to be the definition the UK government uses, it is actually somewhat short of the whole definition. It has the benefit of being quite easy to remember, but a bit less easy to understand. An earlier definition of sustainability also exists: it is about something that is enduring or something that has been around for a while.

There are a number of other commonly used definitions of sustainability, starting with the Brundtland Declaration,⁷ which more or less gave birth to sustainability as we now know it.

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This is often supplemented by the Rio Declaration:⁸

The right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations. In order to achieve sustainable development, environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from it.

Other than an increase in wordiness (and split infinitive), the Rio Declaration pinned environmental protection as a clear path to sustainable development. More recent declarations added to the word count, but the focus remains on environmental protection.⁹

With these definitions sustainability can be (nearly) all things to (nearly) all people. This is great for the ‘single issue’ crowd since it allows them to bang their drums loudly. It also allows legislators to add all manner of unpleasant but necessary rules to further manage (or control or restrict, depending on what you believe) the way we use resources.

Trudy Harpham, professor at London South Bank University, saw sustainability as five components coming together (see Figure 1.1). The erosion of any one of these can cause imbalances in the entire social fabric. For example, if the social capital assets are disrupted, this can lead to poor physical and mental health which will impact on the human capital (low performance); the natural capital (not fully utilised); the financial capital (investments not giving a good return); and the physical capital (assets not optimised).

Figure 1.1 Sustainability – a balance of five assets

Source: T. Harpham

Other ‘Sustainabilities’

With the construction professional in mind, I propose a somewhat different approach in defining sustainability for this book. First, I believe the emphasis needs to be on the company, organisation or business. This book is not about society as a whole or us as individuals with our personal beliefs, but you and I as business professionals. Therefore, the rather general definitions described above need to be tweaked such that they help you in making better decisions.

The definition of sustainability I suggest for companies is:

Sustainability is achieving an effective balance between the financial, social and environmental choices when carrying out business activities.

The emphases are on ‘effective’ and ‘business activities’. If the business activities are not effective, there is no point doing them at all.

This definition is based on the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ proposed by John Elkington,¹⁰ (see Figure 1.2) who recommended that companies see sustainability as three elements that impact on the business: the economic; social; and the environmental.¹¹

Figure 1.2 The Triple Bottom Line

Let Us Explore This Definition in More Detail

Financial factors are more or less what you expect. We need to manage the financial obligations of the organisation, managing the working capital and managing the cash flow because if we do not, then the company shuts its doors and nothing else, including doing social or environmental good can happen.

I have adapted this model into a nine-element analysis similar to the ‘critical to quality’ or CTQ model from Six Sigma Quality management. The Critical to Sustainability (CTS)¹² analysis is shown in Figure 1.2 and made up of three clusters as shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 Criticality analysis for Sustainability

Financial Factors

There are three elements: profit; cash flow; and cash in hand. This covers most of the needs in finance. If an activity satisfies all three areas, then it is clearly good for financial sustainability.

Social Factors

These are the ‘nice stuff’ that make the work environment, the work itself and relations with the neighbours more pleasant. These affect three main groups of people: the committed stakeholders comprising the employees, the shareholders and the families of both groups; the involved stakeholders who are the suppliers and customers, and users of our products and services; and the interested – the external or social stakeholders. The committed and involved classifications are best explained by the following quality management metaphor. ‘Bacon and eggs’ – the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.¹³

If an activity benefits these groups (or a realistic subset of them) then it is ‘doing’ social sustainability.

Environmental Factors

These can be simplified into one sentence: minimise the nasty impacts of what we do in our jobs.¹⁴ Since everything we do uses energy and ‘making’ energy causes environmen...