The Merry Month : Too many acronyms
Robert Merry, an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years and now also runs training courses on project management, gives his personal slant on the stone industry this month.
The ‘Natural Stone – The Sustainable Solution’ seminar this month, facilitated by ConstructionSkills, organised by Stone Federation and hosted by BRE, introduced me to the Green Guide as well as a list of new acronyms to try and remember.
BREEAM (British Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) pronounced ‘brie am’ (a French cheese trying to learn English perhaps?), EPD (Environmental Product Declaration), LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), GHG (Green House Gases), CFSH (Code for Sustainable Homes), FiT (Feed In Tariff), Part L (part L), LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), USGBC (US Green Building Council), HQE (Haute Qualité Environnementale – French standard for green buildings).
Formidable!
And there were some catchy new phrases. Cradle to gate. Cradle to grave. Green Guide rating. Stratospheric ozone depletion. Photochemical ozone creation. Mineral resource extraction. And not forgetting those old favourites fossil fuel depletion, acidification and plain old climate change.
OK, so we need a bit of plain English introduced here for us simpler souls.
This world is peopled by complicated and, of course, necessary scientific analysis of building products and their impact on our environment.
Just ‘cause I can’t always penetrate its thick abbreviated outer skin with my blunt instrument of a mind doesn’t mean it’s not important. But please bear with me while I surface for the occasional gasp of plain English oxygen.
The Green Guide does possess (thanks, I understand, to David Richardson, a former Stone Federation President) a healthy portion of information on the environmental impact of stone from countries including Italy, China and the UK.
Products are rated A+ to E. In the hard flooring section, imported Italian Marble tiles are rated ‘D’, Chinese Granite ‘B’, and UK Limestone ‘A’. Given the amount of stone imported and used in this country, we might have to work hard to convince an ever more environmentally-aware construction industry that stone is a sustainable product for the modern construction theatre.
Building Magazine 30 March announced its Building Awards Project of the Year. There were 16 buildings across several sectors – banking, education, office, laboratories, a Crown Estates refurbishment and the British Film Institute’s Master Film Store.
Apart from the almost obligatory stone entrance hall floor, a ceiling clad in stone in one building and a bit of landscaping, the buildings had no substantial quantities of stone on or in them.
I remember a winner last year – the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and its stone clad central staircase. There were pictures everywhere, accolades from all directions. Are these the first signs of an industry moving away from using stone because it hasn’t got its environmental credentials together?
The Sustainable Solution seminar might be a good effort in raising our awareness of sustainability. But is it enough?
There are plenty of examples of other industries’ efforts to brand their products as sustainable. The UK timber industry, for example, has the Forest Stewardship Council, which provides a three tier system of certification for members to prove their environmental credentials and the sustainability of their products.
There is the Forest Management Certification – could that translate to Quarry Management Certification? There is the Chain of Custody certification for companies that manufacture, process or trade in timber (read ‘stone fabricators / importers’), and FSC Controlled Wood, which gives a Forest Management Certification holder tools to enable them to mix unsustainably produced timber with FSC accredited timber when supplies are short (read ‘accredited’ and ‘unaccredited’ stone sources).
In its own words: “FSC is an international, non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world’s forests”.
A challenge to the Stone Federation and to all of us in the stone industry: can’t we adopt a similar scheme?
How about this (my words): The Stone Federation is a national organisation dedicated to promoting responsible management of the world’s stone resources through evaluation of the environmental impact of all stone used in the UK.
Then, like the FSC, we could have a nationally accredited scheme recognised by the construction industry and all our clients.
Now there’s a thought – and not an acronym in sight!