Tag: sustainable

We have been recognised for our commitment to sustainability with a coveted Bronze award at the International Green Apple Awards for the Built Environment and Architectural Heritage 2016. This is the second time in 3 years we have received this recognition.

Lining up against some much larger companies, including Kier Construction, Carillion/Morgan Sindall JV and Skanska, the prestigious title was awarded for, “clearly demonstrating a drive towards sustainable development.”

The judges also singled out our management for demonstrating incredible foresight by “choosing to invest and diversify the business during the recession while starting to feel the pinch, resulting in strong financial results during the past six years.”

This enabled us to invest in key areas of the business, including training and apprentices, providing young people with a career path in construction and upskilling current employees by providing them with 3.78 training days on average; and £4.4m in plant and equipment, to push environmental and efficiency savings across projects.

Other areas where we were commended, include our continual investment in management systems audited and validated to ISO14001, ISO9001, OHSAS18001 and Achilles BuildingConfidence (5-star rating) accreditation, which ensures we deliver high standards of quality and compliance in health and safety and the environment.

We achieved this while improving their environmental performance with such measures as:

• Going paperless and greening our fleet.
• Sponsoring a wealth of community support initiatives, including: ILEAP, Warwickshire Road Safety, British Blind for Sport, and The Alzheimer’s Society.
• Investing £220k in GPS technology and developing an earthworks modelling team that prevented 75,000m3 of material from going to landfill.

Peter O’Brien, Managing Director at O’Brien Contractors, said: “This award highlights the benefits we bring to the region and our customers by implementing best practices benchmarked against environmental, quality and health and safety performance. We are thrilled our commitment to sustainable development has been recognised with an award.”

We have been shortlisted in the Specialist Contractor of the Year and Sustainable Project of the Year categories for the 2015 Builder and Engineer Awards.

The awards are designed to reward the hard work and creativity of those working in the industry.

The Sustainable Project of the Year accolade is for Nestle’s £200m coffee manufacturing facility, codenamed Project Dove, which saw us deliver an £11m groundworks and civil engineering package.

The judges will be looking for evidence that the winning project has considered the impact on the environment and has contemplated sustainability. With 2012 the wettest year on record, we were presented with a site containing 40,000m3 of spoil not suitable for re-use. The original solution our engineer had designed was no longer viable.

To overcome this, we implemented a soil remediation strategy that subsequently cut costs by £800k, reduced lorry movements by c7,000 saving 15 tonnes CO2, sent no spoil to landfill and reduced imported stone by 70%. We also achieved a zero accident performance with in excess of 90,000 man hours worked and created a safer stable site for ongoing construction work.

The Specialist Contractor of the Year award recognises businesses that have excelled by delivering exceptional performance, increased turnover, invested in innovation, added value to its’ clients and improved health and safety standards. During 2014/2015, we grew turnover by 59.98%, from £17.5m to £28.03m, maintained our accident rates well below industry average, invested £2.4m in new state-of-the-art plant and equipment and delivered 9 multi-million pound contracts which accounted for our 2014 turnover.

The winners will be announced at the Builder and Engineer Awards on Thursday 19^th November at the Emirates Old Trafford, Manchester.