Certification: Seeing the wood for the trees
Sustainable timber has been under the media spotlight over the ast few years with onsite protests by Environmentalists. Richard Stirling talks to Bovis Lend Lease about a radical shake-up in its timber procurement policies.
DESPITE all its talk about sustainability, the construction industry has been responsible for some almighty blunders when it comes to using environmentally sound and responsibly logged timber.
It seems that every couple of months Greenpeace protestors find another excuse to break into construction sites to highlight timber that they trace back to dodgy warlords or mass deforestation in far-flung places like Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Last year, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was left with egg on his face when a scheme to refurbish Nelson’s Column was found to be using a hardwood called bintangor, which came from tropical rainforests and turned the greens a rather pale shade when they discovered it in the project’s hoardings.
Certified sustainable?
Some contractors are trying to tighten up their act and are running pilots where whole projects are certified under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a scheme favoured by Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. Earlier this year, TiC visited a social housing scheme in Ilford built by Hollybrook Homes that guaranteed that most of the timber used in the project was certified by the FSC to have come from legal and sustainable sources.
Now the big boys are talking about carrying out similar schemes and even rolling out responsible procurement across their whole business
Bovis Lend Lease appointed Sam Hall environmental manager for its innovation and performance group with the task of greening up its timber procurement policy. He explains that the company will use FSC as the standard to guarantee that its timber has been procured from legal and sustainable sources.
Bovis is also following in Hollybrook’s footsteps and is currently trialling whole project certification under the FSC scheme on a project in the City of London. The project is to build a £50m office development on Wood Street near St Paul’s Cathedral. Hall says the project has stringent measures to make sure uncertified timber doesn’t sneak its way onsite.
“One of the key things is that we’ve checked that the contractors are ordering FSC-certified timber,” he says. “They have got a booking-in system, so they can’t book deliveries in without proving the load is FSCcertified.
After that, we have a guy on the gate who is trained in what to look for. If the driver can’t prove it’s FSC-certified, it will be sent away.”
A change of culture?
Hall says Bovis is looking to take its stringent procurement methods and expand them to the rest of its business.
“One of the things we are looking at is becoming FSC-certified as a company,” he says. “We have got our first project certification and the next step will be improving reporting and working with our supply chain.”
Although the company has been involved with the Forest Trade Network for some time, Hall says it is only in the last two or three years that Bovis has started to beef up its reporting of how much certified timber it uses.
He explains that the company is currently inspecting between 50% and 70% of its business.
“Last year we estimated we were procuring 90% FSC of recycled timber,” says Hall. “This year that figure has dropped to 84%, which is due to us getting more out of our business reporting. As we develop our system, I reckon our overall performance will be between 75% and 80%. This will improve with time though because we have a chief executive who is making sustainability in general more of a priority for the company.”
Bovis also identifies “hot spots” in a project where uncertified timber could be coming onsite. “We try to get our managers to do a forecast,” Hall explains. “It’s similar to a Site Waste Management Plan where we know where the waste is going to be. We look at the project and get the architects to look at where the timber is going to be and then we can monitor it closely.”
He adds that Bovis has improved its environmental credentials by recruiting former World Wildlife Fund employee Paul Toyne as its new sustainability director. “He brings a lot of experience and contacts,” says Hall. “We’re leading the field of construction companies by some way.”
Spotlight on certification
But FSC isn’t the only timber to promise legality and sustainability. There has been a well-catalogued fight between various timber certifiers to get their schemes approved for government procurement by the advisory body, the Central Point of Expertise on Timber (CPET). The Government currently recognises that five schemes can prove timber comes from legal sources – FSC, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), the US-backed Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the Canadian Standards Association and the Malaysian Timber Certification Council. It also recognises that all but the latter can prove sustainability.
Hall explains that Bovis’ choice to use FSC to certify legality and sustainability was a conscious decision to play it safe.
“I don’t mind which scheme it is as long as it’s sustainable,” he says. “At the moment only FSC gives us that assurance.” Hall adds that the company considers there to be discrepancies in reporting the chain of custody under umbrella bodies such as PEFC. “Argentinean PEFC might not be sustainable for us, but Swedish PEFC might do,” says Hall.
Spreading the word
After a discussion that lasted a couple of years, CPET finally came to a decision on what timber was legal and sustainable at the end of last year. Now that the government adviser has developed a firm stance on Government timber procurement, Hall says it will create ripples across the construction industry. He adds that Bovis wants to take an active role in spreading CPET’s advice to other firms.
“Most construction companies align themselves to CPET,” Hall says. “We have just been doing something with the Major Contractor’s Group (MCG), which will be based on CPET.”
Bovis would like to see major contractors reporting on their use of certified timber under a uniform system. The company has proposed to the MCG and the Construction Confederation Environmental Forum that all companies specify legal and sustainable timber in their contracts and that they review 10% of their projects and report back with the percentage of sustainable timber they use.
“It hasn’t been agreed by all the members yet,” he says, “and the sooner we get a level playing field, the sooner our own statistics will mean something. It’s the first step on the rung to get to where we have got but it will mean that everyone in the industry will be specifying legal and sustainable timber. That’s the whole idea behind CPET.”
Viable alternatives
The Greenpeace protest at the Nelson’s Column project taught the industry a valuable lesson; that it should not only be checking its structural timber is legal and sustainable, but that the same ethics apply to other timbers like hoardings.
Bovis is looking to address this by using alternative hoardings. Hall says the company is experimenting with a process developed by 3DM to use recycled mixed plastics. The process makes boards by sandwiching recycled material between two layers of plastic. “We trialled it on hoardings first,” he explains, “because we found they have the highest risk of not being certified among nonstructural timbers.”
But Hall is keen to point out that the company’s aim to eliminate non-certified timber from its project won’t put it off using timber altogether. “It strikes me that timber is a very sustainable product, and probably one of the most sustainable that you can have,” he says. “There are all kinds of other issues on sustainability that the construction industry has to deal with, such as heating and cooling buildings. But timber is great – there’s no other material that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide in its production.”
Bovis plans to take the message of using legal and sustainable timber out to its suppliers this summer, starting with a training session in the north with ten to 15 subcontractors.
“We are going to get the message of FSC across to them and we will be doing the same thing down south later in the summer,” Hall explains. “We have got a target in our plan that we will get some subcontractors certified under FSC. We’re trying to build it into every single angle of what we do.”
It will be interesting to see if other big hitters follow Bovis and green-up their timber procurement policies, and there is talk that Balfour Beatty is also investigating a whole project certified under FSC.
It looks like the advice from CPET will have a profound effect on the construction industry beyond its intended purpose of recommending procurement policies on government projects. And as timber comes under closer scrutiny by contractors and their clients, its suppliers will doubtless use this to strengthen their claims that it is the greenest building material.
