COVENTRY: Saint-Gobain Building Distribution UK (SGBD), the parent company of builders merchant Jewson, has announced it has comfortably beaten its target for reducing waste to landfill in 2009.

SGBD is widely regarded as leading the sustainability agenda amongst builders’ merchants in the UK, one indication of which was the company’s decision to set and publish key environmental performance indicators through its annual Corporate Responsibility Statement.

In 2008 SGBD set itself the long term aim of halving waste to landfill from a 2008 baseline of 21 310 tonnes down to 10 655 tonnes by the end of 2012.  Annual targets were set for each intervening year to benchmark the company’s achievements.

Figures published by the company this week show that against a waste to landfill target of 19 400 tonnes in 2009, the company actually achieved a figure of 13 449 tonnes – smashing the target by 37%. On a like for like basis this means a 25.8% reduction from 9.3 tonnes per £million of turnover to 6.9 tonnes for each £million of turnover.

The primary focus of SGBD’s activity in reducing the waste is a partnership with Biffa begun in 2007. Biffa  now manages the disposal of waste from all Jewson and sister brand sites through out the UK where previously each site has been responsible for managing its own waste collection and disposal requirements.

The partnership has seen many of the traditional on-site skips replaced by a series of containers to enable separate disposal of recyclable items such as timber, concrete rubble and cardboard significantly reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill.

 

The reduction in landfill waste created is not only good news environmentally for SGBD it also has delivered significant commercial benefits as the company has been able to reduce the cost of processing its landfill waste by £1.2million in 2009.