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How Skanska aims to become the worlds greenest construction company.

The built environment and the natural world have never been easy bedfellows, but Swedish construction group Skanska is trying to change that. The office, which opened in January and features Skanskas deep green cooling system provided by boreholes under the building is the latest expression of a commitment to sustainable development, both as contractor and, in this case, developer. There we can let rip a bit, says Noel Morrin, head of sustainability. We are the investor, we are the designer, we are the engineer, we have bought the land so we can be held 100 per cent accountable for the performance of the product.

Skanska has, for more than a decade, aimed to raise its environmental performance in its work as builder, refurbisher and project manager on high-profile developments and public-private partnerships from the M25 motorway around London to the Metlife stadium in New York. That is not always easy for a company with as big a global footprint as Skanska. For each of its 57,000 employees across three continents, it has between four and five subcontractors making for a total workforce of about a quarter of a million people, working on 10,000 projects annually. It has 100,000 suppliers.

We have a constant challenge to make sure those people understand and live our values, says Morrin. Any one of those companies or subcontractors can destroy our ambition. Skanska is not short on ambition. It wants to be the greenest contractor in the world. It lives by what it calls the five zeros: zero accidents, zero ethical breaches, zero defects, zero lossmaking projects and zero environmental incidents. One former employee says: every day there were conversations and reminders of the importance of this ethos.

The company uses a 3d simulation technique, known as building information modelling, which allows it to identify exact quantities of materials required. Through its use of BiM, Skanska was able to halve waste plasterboard on the first phase of the Barts project, which is thought to have saved thousands of pounds in disposal costs and reduced truck deliveries. It also worked with suppliers to come up with a system of collapsible, reusable plastic packaging for mechanical and electrical products. Along with eradicating waste to landfill, the measure eliminated breakages and reduced injuries from broken glass, for instance. Skanskas focus on sustainability can be traced back to one project: in 1996, it was commissioned to blast and seal rock for a rail tunnel at Hallandss ridge, near Helsingborg, southwest Sweden.

It was the first company to globally implement iSo 14000 standards on environmental management. It was the first company in Scandinavia to set up a global whistleblowing hotline, fully independent of the company. It has been a constituent of the FTSe4Good index, the ethical investment benchmark, for more than a decade.

The Skanska-built Brent Civic Centre, which opened last year near Wembley Stadium in London, was the first public building in the UK to achieve an outstanding environmental assessment rating from the Building research establishment. Its Vla Grd office, in Helsingborg, last year received the highest LEED rating for a new building in Europe. Innovation begins at home: In December, the company began to erect what will be the largest modular apartment block in the world 32 storeys in Brooklyn made up of containers put together in a nearby hangar. The apartments will go up at a rate of up to five a week. Off-site production means Skanska and its partner and client, Forest City Ratner, can cut by more than half the waste created on site. Anybody can build small stuff, says Noel Morrin, Skanskas head of sustainability.

The latest iteration of the design is almost 30 per cent more energy-efficient than standard Swedish housing requirements. In 2010, Skanska even made a high-profile, if brief, entrance into UK house building, as one of the MANCOSA: POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME HANDBOOK: JANUARY 2021 INTAKE 45 45 first foreign entrants to break into the tight-knit industry. In its Seven acres development near Cambridge Skanska went beyond triple-glazing, hyper insulation and solar panelling. One of its overarching ambitions from the outset was to build a community, says Toby Greenhow, a director at Savills, the estate agent. That included lots of open space, allotments and benches in front of houses. Skanska said recently it had no more plans for UK residential schemes, since other building projects were more profitable much to the disappointment of 400 Cambridge residents who had inquired about the next Skanska village.

Source: How Skanska aims to become the worlds greenest construction company, Financial Times, 23/03/14 (Sharman, A.).

QUESTION 1 (25)

Analyse and critically discuss the factors that impact on the consumption of green products.