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How was this guidance developed?

The guidance identified has been selected to meet the following criteria:

• Address the issues particularly relevant to sustainable development and construction material sourcing;
• Provide decision makers (planners, developers and procurers) with information they require to make balanced sustainable development decisions when sourcing construction material;
• Relevant to the objectives/targets of the UK government’s sustainable development strategy;
• Simple and requiring information that is likely to be available; and
• Limited in number, so as not to be too onerous.

The development process contained three elements:

• Review of the major sustainable development issues within the supply chain
• Review of existing tools; and
• Review by stakeholder advisory groups

Review of the major sustainable development issues within the supply chain

Flow charts were created to identify each step of the supply chain for different construction materials from source; whether it be winning primary material from a quarry or processing recycled material at a demolition site; through to delivery to the new development site. The major environmental, social and economic impacts of each of the steps were then considered. From this, a set of issues were identified that have key impacts on the sustainability of development proposals.

Review of existing tools

A range of existing sustainable development criteria, tools or indicators were then reviewed. It was considered that using part or all of an already established and accepted mechanism of assessing sustainable development would save development time. Some of the more prominent sustainable development criteria/tools are listed below. These tools have particular uses. Some useful links have been provided below, which give more information on their uses.

• CEEQUAL – A Civil Engineering Environmental Quality and Assessment Scheme
• CIRIA – Sustainable construction company indicators
• CIRIA – Sustainable accounting in the construction industry
• Constructing Excellence indicators
• ENTEC - Guide to sustainable development appraisal (adobe acrobat format)
• SPeAR
• TRL – Towards an integrated assessment approach for aggregate supply options
• TRL - Aggregates and the environment - indicators for procurement and benchmarking -
• BRE – Ecopoints (adobe acrobat format)
• BREEAM
• SEEDA – Sustainability checklist

Each of these tools has its own specific use and therefore no individual set of criteria was identified that fully meet the requirement of this guidance. Many cover environmental issues, but few the wider social and economic issues. However elements of different tools were considered to be of use with particular regard to the sourcing of construction materials.

Review by advisory groups

A wide range of issues were identified through the review of the supply chain and the existing tools. However, in order to provide simple guidance on the key sustainable development issues relating to material sourcing, the list needed to be reviewed and only the most relevant selected. Therefore, advisory groups reviewed the guidance being developed to come to a consensus as to the most relevant and simplest issues to select.

The guidance was developed in parallel through two projects; the London Sustainable Construction Project and the National Waste Mass Reduction (Construction) Project. Therefore the development process was reviewed by two advisory groups, which comprised of members from the following organisations:

Kent County Council
WRAP
Environment Agency
Transport for London
Forum for the Future
Golder Associates
BRE
London Remade
Royal Bank of Scotland
SEPA
Cardiff Business School
Biffa Waste Services
Construction Products Association
NHBC
RMC
Mandix
ICE
London Sustainability Exchange

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