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Green office podcast promotes approach of ‘waste not, want not’
Press release
Published on 02.02.2011
A recycling rate of 95%, achieved during an office refurbishment in a run-of-the-mill 1980s office building, sounds like a dream of the future.
But in the latest episode of the Green Office podcast, from office design experts Morgan Lovell, we learn that office fit outs and refurbishments are increasingly able to attain rates of over 90%.
Recorded on a construction site in central London, this episode focuses on how waste, in the form of demolition and construction materials, leftover furniture, fixtures and fittings, can be dealt with to ensure that ever-decreasing amounts are sent to landfill.
Nick Davey, project manager at Morgan Lovell, explains how the simple segregation and stockpiling of waste during demolition, building and fit out, enables the maximum amount to be collected in a ‘milk round’ by dedicated contractors, who then take it to be recycled. This may seem to be a lot of time and effort, but Nick’s experience suggests otherwise.
“Times have changed,” says Nick. “If you had asked me five years ago, I think people would’ve said ‘Oh, what are we doing this for?’. But I think that now people have changed, policies have changed, governments have changed.”
The construction and operation of the built environment generally accounts for about 50% of total global carbon dioxide emissions. An often forgotten consideration in the reduction of this figure is what is done with materials and equipment that are no longer needed. The responsibility for this largely falls with companies like Morgan Lovell.
The traditional method of collecting unsegregated waste using compactors can achieve a recycling rate of around 50%. But when we’re talking about waste in terms of tonnage, an additional 45% of waste being recycled is monumental. And a rate of 100% is looking ever more attainable, as Nick describes how, on a recent project for the Committee for Climate Change, Morgan Lovell achieved a recycling rate of 98%.
Thankfully it seems that in the UK at least the future is, for want of a better word, constructive. Nick explains that it’s not just fit out companies who are doing their part; the entire supply chain is on board with reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill.
Nick said, “I think we as an industry have changed dramatically. Everybody personally feels that they can do their bit to try not to keep destroying things.
“We want to be building things and reusing as much as we can.”
To download this episode, log on to www.morganlovell.com/podcasts or subscribe via iTunes.
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