Sustainability expert Ian Nicholson, currently working with Realstone, offers some advice on environmental and ethical responsibilities.

Many companies have been concerned with environmental management for a number of years. This probably started 15 or 20 years ago when legislation around pollution prevention and waste really started to be developed. This period also saw the start of serious uptake of the ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems as a means of helping companies manage their environmental impacts and keep them on the right side of the law. But unless you operated in an industry that received close attention from environmental regulators of the various pollution permitting regulations, the levels of fines and prosecutions levied by the courts did not provide the necessary ‘stick’ for the vast majority of organisations to reduce their impacts. This was particularly true within the construction sector.

Over the past decade or so a much wider range of regulations has been introduced, covering packaging, carbon emissions reporting and site waste management plans, to name a few.

However, the level of regulatory resource has not been increased in proportion with the rate of new legislation and so the level of enforcement remains low and hence risk of prosecution also remains relatively low. This has resulted in a lack of regulatory drivers for many organisations to improve their performance.

There are, though, non-regulatory drivers emerging in the form of increasing environmental focus in the tendering process by supply chain leaders.

The ability to answer pre-qualification questionnaires and tender questions on environmental issues has been the single biggest reason for clients, particularly those within the construction sector, engaging with Responsible Solutions over the past five or six years.

The predominant focus has been a desire to demonstrate the existence of environmental management systems, sometimes through certification to the ISO 14001 standard.

Over the past three or four years we have seen the focus broaden into questions that particularly focus on topics such as carbon footprinting and corporate responsibility. It is this focus on corporate responsibility that is proving particularly interesting and indicates a shift away from direct legal drivers as a reason for action.

Organisations are increasingly acknowledging that damage to their brand as a result of not being environmentally aware is more significant than potential fines from any legal non-compliance.

Corporate responsibility and a focus on brand reputation have also brought social issues more into focus alongside environmental concerns.

Some major brands – Nike, Adidas and Primark, for example – have demonstrated over recent years what can happen if social issues within supply chains are ignored.

These wider social or ethical issues are now coming into focus within the construction sector as a number of major contractors, led predominantly by companies such as LendLease, Skanska and Willmott Dixon, acknowledge that their brand reputation is at risk if something goes wrong environmentally or ethically within their supply chains.

Enter ‘Responsible Sourcing’, the name currently adopted by the construction industry that pulls a whole range of environmental and social issues together into one framework.

Unlike the past decade, where the focus outlined above has been predominantly focussed on the on-site activities of contractors, Responsible Sourcing is a framework focussed specifically on product manufacturers.

Over the years a range of different standards and certification labels have been developed to assist organisations demonstrate their credentials. These include:

• ISO 14001: Environmental Management System Standard, which demonstrates that a robust procedural framework for identifying and managing environmental issues is in place
• PAS 2050 Carbon Footprinting Standard demonstrating the level of carbon dioxide emissions in products.
• Halving Waste to Landfill: A formal commitment, derived from the target set in the 2008 Sustainable Construction Strategy, to reduce waste generation on construction projects.
• Global Reporting Initiative: A framework for monitoring and reporting corporate performance against a range of environmental and social issues.
• Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI): A means of demonstrating a corporate focus on ethical issues within the supply chain.
• Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and FTSE4Good: Investment based indexes containing companies assessed for their environmental/ethical performance.
• BES 6001: Framework Standard for the Responsible Sourcing of Construction Products.

BES 6001 was specifically written as a product certification standard for construction products and is the only one of the approaches mentioned above that brings together a range of environmental and social issues into a single certification standard.

It was developed and is owned by BRE, which licenses a range of Certification Bodies to conduct audits against it.

The first references to responsible sourcing as a topic appeared in the first (2006) edition of the ‘Code for Sustainable Homes’. It then gained further weight as an issue in the 2008 ‘Strategy for Sustainable Construction’, which set a target for 25% of all construction products to be purchased via responsible sourcing schemes by 2012.

Unlike the target to halve waste to landfill, this target received very little air time within the industry, possibly due to a lack of knowledge and also widely varying ideas of what responsible sourcing actually means.

As a result it is a concept that has resulted in a low level of uptake thus far.

Certification to BES 6001, the framework standard for the responsible sourcing of construction products as developed by BRE, is one means for a company to prove that it is taking such issues seriously and, more importantly, assume a proactive stance on ethics with regard to sourcing of materials or products.

The BES 6001 standard was designed to provide a framework for those organisations wanting to demonstrate transparency of raw materials in the supply chain and prove that responsible sourcing is at the forefront of their activities.

The standard itself is applicable to construction products only and has, to date, been used predominantly to certify, among others, bulk construction material suppliers such as aggregate suppliers, cement manufacturers and concrete block manufacturers.

However, the range of products for which certification is being sought is now expanding rapidly. One of the sectors it is impacting is dimensional stone, including Realstone, which has engaged Responsible Solutions to assist it in achieving the BES 6001 standard.

The requirements of the framework standard have been structured into three components:

Organisational management requirements (Section 3.2), covering:

• Responsible Sourcing Policy,
• Legal Compliance,
• Quality Management Systems;
• Supplier Management;

Supply chain management requirements (Section 3.3.), covering:

• Material traceability
• Environmental Performance

Health and Safety Performance and environmental and social requirements (section 3.3), covering:

• Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Waste minimisation
• Resource Efficiency
• Water extraction
• Life Cycle Analysis
• Transport
• Employment and Skills
• Local Community

Certain requirements within these three components are compulsory and anyone applying for certification against the standard must prove that they are compliant with these.

Meeting the compulsory requirements of each category, however, does not score any points. You must go further than these ‘minimum’ requirements if any additional credits are to be achieved.

For other requirements, additional performance ratings are allocated, enabling you to score a given number of points for proving compliance to each rating.

‘Pass’, ‘Good’, ‘Very Good’ or ‘Excellent’ ratings are awarded, depending on how many credits are achieved in each section.

The overall final rating will be given by the lowest score achieved in either the combined sections 3.2 and 3.3, or in 3.4. For example, should an organisation score a ‘Very Good’ in sections 3.2 and 3.3 but only score a ‘Good’ in section 3.4, then the organisation would receive a ‘Good’ rating.

Achieving anything more than a ‘Pass’ depends on the management systems the applicant organisation has in place – it must be certified to at least one of ISO 9001 for Quality Assurance, ISO 14001 for Environmental Management Systems or OHSAS 18001 for Health & Safety.

Given the range of topics covered by BES 6001, it is difficult to say exactly how long the certification process takes. It will very much depend upon what an organisation already has in place with respect to environmental issues (for instance, do they already have an environmental management system?), the resources available to it and the extent of work that needs to be undertaken in order to bring the organisation up to the required standard to achieve certification.

However, upon submitting the application form and application fee to the certification body, it typically takes around three months to complete the certification process, which includes site visits from the certification body.

BES 6001 is due to be revised this year when the conclusions drawn from a stakeholder consultation process will be used to develop the third version of the standard.

Engaging in responsible sourcing can be used as a means of protecting your reputation, through the requirements to assess your supply chain to ensure it represents social and ethical integrity. It can also generate business through improved competitive advantage – there are plenty of companies and individuals within companies who do not want to be associated with firms that demonstrate ethically or socially unsound practices.

Awareness of the concept of environmental and ethical practices is increasing constantly and those firms that engage with it will find themselves at the forefront of the industry.