Bringing Environmental Awareness On site
Although still not perfect, the UK construction industry has made significant strides through better design, methods and materials to reduce the environmental impact of the built environment. For example, BREEAM is the world’s leading environmental assessment method for sustainable buildings. It enables designers, developers and building managers to demonstrate the environmental credentials of their buildings, against a universally recognized, benchmarked set of standards.
The fact remains that a great deal of our environmental impact is governed by what happens on site. All the design standards and policies in the world have limited effect if the people supervising onsite works lack the awareness of environmental risks or the understanding of practical measures that should be taken to limit them.
Osborne is committed to backing up our corporate commitments to sustainability and environmental protection with practical action at all levels in our organization. Since 2014 we have been enthusiastic adopters of the Site Environmental Awareness Training Scheme (SEATS).
SEATS is an accredited training scheme offered by the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and is recognised by the industry. It focuses on environmental issues on construction sites. SEATS is a key feature in our investment in training for site management and supervisory teams, as well as employees in job roles such as commercial, estimating, planning, engineering and design.
Progress
To date, we’ve trained 300 staff members; 180 of those are managers and supervisors. The one-day course aims to promote informed and responsible decision-making on all construction sites. It focuses on the practical requirements of managers and supervisors and on implementing pre-agreed processes, not planning them. Each session contains practical measures, lots of “watch out for this” prompts and is summarised with practical dos and don’ts.
The course teaches environmental best practice, covering theoretical areas (the importance of the environment), practical areas (waste, energy and water management and pollution prevention), and peripheral matters (such as statutory nuisance, communication, archaeology and heritage).
Osborne’s Basil Frostick, who has been accredited by CITB to deliver the course within the business is an enthusiastic advocate:
“The importance of environmental awareness cannot be emphasised enough. The construction industry has a major impact on the environment, so the responsibility lies with site managers. It is a privilege to be the trainer accredited to deliver the course, and Osborne will practice what it preaches by making sure all of our site personnel with management and supervisory responsibilities attend.”
The other attractive aspect of SEATS is consistency. Because SEATS is industry-wide, subcontractors undergo similar training to main contractors. It helps main contractors to work effectively with multiple subcontractors, and subcontractors to work with multiple contractors without having to undertake different versions of similar training.
Build UK, with funding from CITB, developed this programme to ensure that common training can be implemented across a range of companies, reducing costs and downtime. Like most companies we still have individual requirements for site inspections, environmental reporting, paperwork retention and method statements, but the majority of the required knowledge is covered by SEATS.
We firmly believe that every person with responsibility for what happens on construction sites needs to have excellent awareness of environmental issues. Each day they need to carry with them a commitment to minimising the environmental impact of their work. SEATS is in valuable in helping us to meet that goal.
