Judges’ summary
This 2nd year of Stone Federation’s Natural Stone Sustainability Awards were presented last month during EcoBuild at ExCeL London, where the Natural Stone Show will be held in 2013. Given the emerging awareness of just how significant and important the sustainability agenda has become across the entire construction industry, the Stone Federation decided last year to create a separate Awards scheme to recognise moves towards greater sustainability by the stone industry. Below are the Judges’ comments about this year’s entries in the Sustainability Awards.
“As part of Stone Federation’s on-going sustainability programme, the objective of the Sustainability Awards is to illustrate the sustainable qualities of natural stone and to recognise outstanding achievement, awareness and innovation in sustainability among Federation members.
“The range of relevant and different projects in the current round of submissions readily reveals how the impact of sustainability understanding is also developing across the breadth of the stone industry. Recognised and celebrated through the Sustainability Awards scheme, the increasing influence created by the sensitive and sustainable working, choice, and use of stone is to be saluted.
“In assessing the submissions, the judges were looking for an awareness and sensitivity of approach and a range of innovative impacts resulting from how the different projects had been conceived, developed and executed. What the submissions needed to demonstrate was a commitment to achieving sustainable solutions over as broad a perspective as possible. Just how versatile the stone industry is in recognising that potential is well revealed by the quality of previous and current submissions – and how well they supported these diverse challenges.
“Using stone in an economic manner was historically, and still is, an important consideration. To achieve this in a fully sustainable manner, where the associated benefits are also far reaching, is exemplified by the submitted projects in the present Awards round.
“To the 2012 winners, in recognition of their conceptual awareness of how to obtain that much more from an original initiative, and the integrated teamwork that has created their success: congratulations. Building upon an understanding of original constructional methods and an awareness of functional effectiveness, the underlying pragmatism that has driven the projects illustrate how the right approach, setting and methodology can positively impact on many. Their creative approach and successful end results readily offer inspiration, vision and models as a stimulus and motivation for others.”

Re-use of materials

NAME OF PROJECT: La Moinerie Hotel
LOCATION: Sark, Channel Islands
ARCHITECT: Lovell Ozanne
MAIN CONTRACTOR: Empire Builders
Ltd
PRINCIPAL STONE CONTRACTOR:
Granite Le Pelley Ltd
The project
La Moinerie Hotel was established in Sark many years ago utilising old granite farm buildings built in the 18th Century. The hotel had been struggling due to years of under investment and was surrounded by a number of derelict old farm out-buildings. The tenement, which included the hotel, was purchased in 2008 and the new owners wished to sensitively refurbish and renew the hotel whilst increasing the number of bedrooms.
Work commenced at the end of 2009 using a local Sark building contractor, after receiving planning consent.

Judges: This entry stands out for the breadth of the impact it is helping to create

Workshop / Premises

NAME OF PROJECT: Solar cell power for
Bowdens Quarry and Downs Quarry
QUARRY OWNER: Lovell Purbeck ltd
The project
In the past year Lovell Purbeck has invested heavily in generating its own electricity at both of its quarries and its processing facilities.
The new tile processing factory at Downs Quarry, Purbeck, was commissioned last year and has had a photo voltaic (PV) electricity generation system installed on to the roof. This has a capacity of 50KWp (the ‘p’ stands for potential). That equates to 20% of the total electricity requirements for the processing facility. At weekends and on sunny evenings when not processing stone, surplus electricity is fed back into the National Grid.
Since it was commissioned in November 2011, the plant has generated more than 2,500KWh of electricity, which is not bad for two of the darkest months of the year.
A similar system has also been installed at Lovell Purbeck’s other site, Bowdens Quarry in Somerset, although the system is slightly smaller at 47KWp. When it is sunny it produces enough electricity to run all the processing plant, making the site self sufficient in electricity. Since the middle of December 2011 when the system was commissioned, it has generated more than 1,500KWh of electricity, 1,000KWh of which has been fed back into the National Grid as surplus.
The two PV schemes together cost more than £230,000 but Lovell Purbeck expect the payback period to be less than 10 years.
Apart from helping to reduce costs, one of the main benefits is that it reduces the company’s carbon footprint. A project for this year will be to assess just what the carbon footprint is per tonne of extracted stone.

Judges: More companies should adopt this sort of thinking

Landscape

NAME OF PROJECT: Nelson Town
Centre Public Realm Improvements
ARCHITECT/DESIGNER: Pendle Borough
Council
MAIN CONTRACTOR: JR Moran
PRINCIPAL STONE CONTRACTOR:
Hardscape Products
STONE USED: Naylor Hill Yorkstone
Woodkirk Stone
The project
Nelson is Pendle’s largest town and administrative hub, although 50 years of decline have left it with deep-seated complex economic problems.
Pendle Borough Council (PBC) was granted £2.3million funding to recreate the High Street in Nelson Town Centre. The funding has enabled the Council to reintroduce slow moving traffic to a previously pedestrianised precinct in the town centre. The Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) contributed £1.34m and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) contributed £984,500.
The success of this scheme is due in no small measure to the considerable, appropriate and sensitive use of sustainable indigenous local stone.