was sponsored through her environmental engineering degree by Bovis and then spent a couple of years as business development manager at Franklin + Andrews. In 2003, she set up environmental and sustainability consultant Element 4 – at the age of just 26.
Sustainability is a really overused word. It’s been a buzzword for quite a long time – quite an empty buzzword – so people switch off when they hear it.
I went into construction for the money. I had no particular ambition to go into the industry but when I was on a university open day I met someone who mentioned she was sponsored by a company, which gave her money and work in the holiday, and I thought that sounded brilliant. So I wrote loads of letters to engineering companies and the best offer I got was from Bovis. I became their first environment manager and set up their environmental management unit.
I always knew I wanted to set up my own business. Both my parents run their own businesses so I didn’t have that kind of fear about it that some people have. I started Element 4 in June 2003 and at first it was just me in my front bedroom at home; now I have six members of staff. We’ve grown quite quickly and we’re looking to expand quite a lot more this year as well. I was really lucky – on the first day of setting up the business I got my first two projects which were both two-and-a-half year contracts, so that really set me up. We’ve since won some work with DEFRA, which for an environmental consultant is just brilliant. We’re working on the refurbishment of their main office and we’re also developing a sustainability toolkit that would enable everybody who works for them to ask the right questions and make the right decisions on procuring sustainable materials and services and so on – even starting with questioning the project justification itself.
There’s a massive amount of waste in the construction industry. Our suppliers are giving us a problem. We’re buying something from them and we’re paying them money and then we’re having to pay to remove something they’ve given us – so we’re paying twice. At Element 4 we look at the problem from several angles and try to get our suppliers to work with us to take the problem away.
I don’t care why companies look at sustainability. If they look at it in a cynical way and they want to make money out of it why not? Because of the capitalist world we live in, companies understand money, and if they’re going to lose money because of something – like acting unsustainably – they’re going to act on it. I think essentially that is the way that you have to speak to the corporate world – you have to say, look it makes financial sense for you to do this. It becomes obvious very quickly when companies are just using “greenwash” because they can say that they are green or environmentally friendly but as soon as you scratch the surface it becomes very clear they’re not.
I don’t work in the environmental industry, I work in the construction industry. That’s how we’re different from other environmental consultants: we get under the skin of the construction industry and spend a lot of time sitting down and talking to engineers, architects and developers to really understand what they do, what their business is and what the pressures are that are on them. We are very specialist – we’re a niche consultancy – but that means it’s all we do, we don’t take our eye off the ball. We know the industry inside out and our clients like that.
People in construction don’t care about the academics of sustainability. All they want to know is what they have to do to get their job done. I know the pressure people on site are under and the last thing they need is another initiative. So our job is about taking this high-level sustainability concept and saying, there’s this big issue here but don’t worry about that, what you need to be doing on site is x, y, z. At the moment we’re the sustainability champion on Land Securities’ £220m New Street Square project in London. We’ve developed a sustainability charter, which has objectives with specific targets to be met. Our clients like it because they know they have responsibilities but they’re not sure how to translate that into the day to day running of the project.
Source
Building Sustainable Design
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