National Rail Awards
RICHARD FOSTER highlights the eco-friendly achievements of construction company BAM Nuttall, the winner of the Environmental Excellence Award at RAIL’s 2023 National Rail Awards
The construction industry is one of the greatest contributors to global carbon emissions.
Statistics published in the wake of 2022’s COP27 climate talks in Egypt claim that the construction sector accounted for 37% of energy and process-related CO2 emissions in 2021. That figure looks set to increase, which has led to the United Nations voicing its concerns that the mission to decarbonise the industry by 2050 is well off-track.
There is one construction company that’s trying to beat that trend, and RAIL’s National Rail Awards judges recognised its efforts by awarding it the Environmental Excellence Award 2023.
It is well-deserved recognition for a construction company that takes its responsibilities - to working sustainably, to carbon zero construction and to improving biodiversity - very seriously.
Proof of this is that it is working to achieving net zero - balancing the amount of carbon produced with the amount of carbon that is removed from the atmosphere - by 2026.
That’s nearly a quarter of a century earlier than the targets set at COP21, in the UN’s Climate Change Conference’s Paris Agreement in 2015.
“What I see in many net zero commitments is that they are set so far in the future that they’re beyond the retirement age of the people who set them,” says Sarah Jolliffe, environmental sustainability business partner at BAM Nuttall.
Jolliffe has spent the last eight years focusing her energy on improving BAM’s green credentials, and says its strategies and targets will be “driven and seen through by the people who are setting those targets”.
“I was primarily focused on the carbon agenda,” she says. But her remit has now grown to ensure that sustainability is at the heart of BAM’s strategic development and ensuring that acting sustainably is “embedded” at an operational level, even down to the sub-contractors it employs.
The year 2024 looks set to be an important one for BAM, because it is due to publish its full Carbon Offset Strategy.
At the time of writing, BAM was keeping the contents close to its chest, but it will be a watershed document - and it lays down the gauntlet for others to follow. “We want to show our peers in the industry that you can do it,” Jolliffe says.
BAM remains realistic about what it can achieve in such a short space of time, however. While it is making great strides towards a future where fossil fuels won’t be consumed on site, Jolliffe is open about the fact that this won’t happen overnight.
“We’re still going to be burning diesel of so
