Construction Firm’s green pledge
11th May 2010
Tees Valley building & civil engineering firm Henderson Campbell has publicly promised to be as green as possible.
Delighted to have been certified with ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) 14001, the Guisborough-based company boss Antony Henderson is keen to use the standards as a base from which to move forward.
“Civil engineering isn’t probably an industry that is automatically considered to be environmentally aware but we can always improve and I see this as just the first stage in us doing our bit and further reducing our carbon footprint,” said Antony.
“We already try to conserve energy in our office and, ultimately, our aim is to reduce our carbon footprint on our sites. Similarly we always aim to use sustainable or recyclable materials on our building projects.”
ISO 14001 is concerned with environmental management. Certified organisations have to be seen to minimise harmful effects on the environment caused by its activities and achieve continual improvement of its environmental performance.
To achieve it, Henderson Campbell changed all light bulbs at its Morgan Drive head office and has reduced the number of hours its heating is on. All documents are now printed via a central machine and emails are never printed out to keep paper use to a minimum.
The company also endeavours to transport its workforce to sites around the country by the greenest means possible. Minibuses are used rather than a fleet of half empty vans as used to be the case. All staff are also to be trained how to respond to any environmental incidents that could occur whilst on site, such as petrol spills.
Henderson Campbell’s ISO 14001 certification comes less than six months after the firm was certified with ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) 9001. That was achieved, in part, thanks to the experience of working in partnership with a larger firm that had already achieved the standard.
“When we first teamed up with Caledonian Building Systems to erect new prison buildings for the Home Office, we experienced its management procedures first hand and it made sense for us to implement and work to the same system. When we brought in a consultant for help in achieving ISO 9001, we therefore found we didn’t have to improve too much,” explained Antony.
“Local Authorities and many other major organisations – all potential clients – are increasingly looking for assurance of quality from the contractors they use and both ISO 9001 and 1400 are well-recognised indications of this.
“The changes we implemented have made us more efficient and, hopefully, given existing and future clients even more confidence in Henderson Campbell as a consistently reliable company.”
ISO 9001 contains a generic set of requirements for implementing a quality management system that can be applied to any organisation, whatever its size, product, service or sector.
Henderson Campbell would like to thank Business Link North East who part-funded the cost of achieving both ISO 9001 and ISO 14000.