Author: Nerve Admin

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) ratings are increasingly essential for businesses. Not only do they help evaluate and quantify efforts to become more sustainable, they are also an important signal for investors – and a strong predictor of operational performance.

However, measuring ESG can be challenging. Because businesses need data on the environmental impact of their entire value chain – including everything from the materials they use to the welfare equipment they procure. 

In this article, we explore the challenge of measuring ESG for construction firms – and how Welfare Hire’s eco-calculator is designed to help.

Three reasons to measure environmental impact

1. To validate your sustainability strategy

As Antony Brophy, Director of Business Development, Cobuilder, recently told ConstructionNews, a lack of data makes it near-impossible to be confident that our efforts to reduce carbon emissions are working¹. Consistent measurement is therefore vital to assess the impact any sustainability initiative you launch has. 

You may believe a new mobile welfare unit or lighting tower is helping curb emissions, but without real data – it’s all just guess work.

2. To enable targeted solutions

Once you have data on the emissions and environmental impact of your equipment and materials, you can make better informed decisions about how to improve things. You can target the most harmful – or easiest to improve – areas of your business first, and see exactly how much these changes impact your overall ESG rating.

This is particularly important as construction firms are often plagued by hidden emissions (often known as “embodied carbon”)², meaning decision makers often overlook big sustainability wins.

3. To track your business’s progress

Net-zero carbon and other sustainability goals are not short-term challenges – they are long-term projects that will require ongoing maintenance and monitoring. Data is crucial in this regard, as it enables your business to track and adjust its efforts over time.

When, for example, you switch suppliers and introduce a new model of mobile welfare unit, you would always assess the financial implications of the decision. And exactly the same protocols should be in place to assess the effect a decision will have on your business’s ESG rating.

Why are ESG ratings difficult to measure?

ESG is difficult to measure in part because there is no single accepted way of doing it. There are a range of ESG frameworks³, and each will produce a different rating depending on the particulars of your company’s activities. 

Without a set of standardised criteria, many fear that ESG scores are unreliable indicators of a business’s true environmental impact⁴. But for construction businesses, this is not the biggest concern.

The biggest concern is that the average construction firm’s supply chain is large and complex, meaning assessing the overall impact of your activities is challenging – especially when suppliers are unable to provide you with their own ESG data.

Suppliers must provide accurate data

Many construction suppliers are not forthcoming with information about their products’ ESG credentials – meaning contractors will struggle to gain full visibility of their environmental impact. They will give you the full spec on their mobile welfare units, but cannot help you when it comes to determining how their products will impact your sustainability efforts.

This is exactly why Welfare Hire created our Eco Calculator – a simple tool to provide full transparency to our partners and help them understand how each of our market-leading products will change their site’s overall emissions. 

It is based on rigorous research where we took over 500,000 hire days’ worth of live site data on our products and compared it with the market standard. This enabled us to quantify the relative savings and environmental impact our product suite offers. 

You can try it for yourself today

As scientists warn that the climate crisis is accelerating, businesses are under ever greater pressure to ensure they hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And few industries face as big a challenge as construction.

The industry produces roughly 11% of global carbon emissions¹, ranking as the sixth highest carbon emitting industry in the UK². But most businesses’ value-chain involves a complex range of carbon-emitting processes. 

From the manufacturer and transport of construction materials to the specialist equipment used onsite, decarbonising construction requires careful attention at every level of the supply chain.

Yet too many firms overlook the role equipment like welfare units and lighting towers should play in their decarbonising strategy.

The risk of overlooking vehicles

The construction industry’s decarbonising efforts have received ample funding and support from the UK government. But the government’s initial carbon budget didn’t feature considerations for construction equipment until 2035³. 

This is a problem for three clear reasons:

1. Primary emissions

The daily use of construction vehicles and specialist equipment involves emitting a great deal of carbon. For example: running a standard static unit for 40 hours per week can produce around 215kg of CO₂.

Across even a relatively small fleet this adds up very quickly. Factor in lighting towers, vehicle mounted access platforms and other specialist equipment – and you start to see really significant emissions.

2. Secondary emissions

Not only do these vehicles and equipment produce carbon themselves – they also require maintenance and servicing. And that means further carbon is emitted getting to and from the site to refill water tanks or service faulty machinery.

While some emissions of this kind may be inevitable, much is not. For example: most mobile welfare units used today feature outdated water tanks which necessitate more frequent refills. Simply reducing the frequency of these refills would slash transport emissions onsite.

3. Strategic oversight

Finally, overlooking factors such as onsite vehicles and specialist equipment may lead to a lack of commitment. A focus on larger factors like building materials and innovative methodologies is justified. But it is also important to take smaller factors into account. 

As most experts agree, a truly effective net-zero strategy must encompass every aspect of the entire value-chain and building lifecycle. Actively neglecting mobile welfare units is symptomatic of a failure to do this.

Eco welfare units are an easy win

Reaching net-zero is a serious challenge for all businesses in the construction industry. It will require enormous innovation and strategic ingenuity. But eco-friendly welfare units and other specialist equipment already exist – and are relatively easy to introduce to your project.

This makes the transition an easy win for companies struggling to formulate an effective strategy – and a great way to ensure you are doing something impactful today.  

For more opportunities to partner together, check out our other company, Access Hire Nationwide, the UK’s leading hirer of vehicle mounted access platforms. Kelling Group is a leading provider of specialist access, welfare and lighting equipment hire and services to key infrastructure and construction sectors.

With inflation reaching over 9% in the UK, the Bank of England has issued an apocalyptic warning about rising fuel costs¹. 

This could spell disaster for many construction businesses – especially those that rely on mobile welfare units, Vehicle Mounted Access platforms and a range of other motorised equipment.

But what if skyrocketing fuel prices became the catalyst for much-needed change in the industry? And what if the apparent crisis actually led businesses to a more cost-effective approach to fuel?

In this article, we explore these very possibilities, demonstrating how innovative ECO products can slash sites’ reliance on fuel. 

But first, let’s see how bad things really are when it comes to fuel costs.

How bad is the fuel crisis?

We began sounding the alarm on rising fuel prices in March of this year. New legislation on red diesel was threatening to double many contractors’ fuel costs, and we’ve since seen a rising wave of fuel theft².

But this has proven to be the tip of the iceberg. From supply chain shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine to the ongoing “cost of living crisis”, upwards pressure on most forms of fuel have been pervasive and intense.  

Petrol and diesel prices both hit new record highs in March – and then once again in May. Petrol was £0.34 more than the previous high of March, and Diesel was £0.39 more³. 

There is, of course, growing pressure on the government to provide relief for businesses and individuals suffering under the weight of inflation. But the reality is fuel prices are, in the words of a journalist, the “prisoner of geopolitics”⁴. And experts expect the current situation to continue indefinitely.

We need long-term solutions

Many industry leaders have frantically lobbied for government support, or tried to access cheaper fuel sources. But these are already being revealed to be band-aid solutions.

Instead, businesses must seek long-term solutions – the most obvious of which would be to replace their existing vehicles with units that require radically less fuel.

Welfare Hire’s ECOXLi unit is a perfect example of how this can be done. Its hybrid system utilises next generation Lithium cell batteries and full solar technology enabling long-life silent running. And its Biofuel generator is used exclusively for recharge requirements, ensuring your fuel needs are minimised.

On top of that, the welfare unit features a user-friendly Smart Telemetry system that enables you to track and optimise your power usage, ultimately helping further minimise the need for fuel and carbon.

Welfare Hire can help you through

At Welfare Hire, we have developed our entire range of mobile welfare units, lighting units and welfare vans around these very issues. We help businesses not only reduce their reliance on fuel, but improve their onsite wellbeing, their environmental impact and their bottom line. 

At Welfare Hire, we have developed our entire range of mobile welfare units, lighting units aIf you’d like to learn more about our range, get in contact today.

Did you know that air pollution is currently considered the single biggest threat to public health in the UK?

Clean Air Day is all about bringing attention to this issue, and inspiring individuals, businesses and communities to take meaningful action. But what has air pollution got to do with construction businesses? And what can they do to help the cause?

In this article, we explain how construction businesses contribute to air pollution – and explore how upgrading to more fuel-efficient welfare units can radically reduce the emissions your site produces.

How harmful is air pollution?

We all understand that air quality matters. But in developed countries, we often assume that air pollution is primarily a concern for other, less developed countries.

Statistically speaking, this is true: 95% of deaths related to pollution occur in medium and low income countries¹. Yet analysis of the long-term impact of air quality shows that it is still a serious concern in countries like the UK.

Up to 36,000 UK deaths each year are attributed to long-term exposure, and evidence suggests poor air quality contributes to everything from heart disease to lung cancer². Economists estimate that in London alone, air pollution costs the healthcare system nearly £4 billion each year³.

How responsible is construction?

As the world’s largest industry, construction tends to be implicated in most environmental issues – and air pollution is no different.

Construction sites produce approximately 7.5% of damaging nitrogen oxide emissions; 8% of large particle emissions (PM10); and 14.5% of emissions of the most dangerous fine particles (PM2.5)⁴.

In total, researchers estimate that construction is responsible for 23% of all air pollution. This has wide ranging implications:

1. Workers’ health

Research suggests that each year, more than 230 construction workers die from cancer caused by exposure to diesel fumes⁵.

2. Local air quality

When emissions are not properly mitigated against, the areas surrounding a construction site tend to have far lower air quality – often impacting the health of residents⁶.

3. Environmental harm

Construction projects tend to have particularly high carbon emissions. This means construction is currently stated to contribute 40% of the UK’s total climate change impact⁷.

How construction can clean up its act

What Is striking about the figures stated above is where these emissions come from. Just 1% is accounted for by dust from demolition sites⁸; instead, the vast majority of these emissions are the product of the various equipment, vehicles and generators a construction site requires.

Increasingly, construction sites are learning to mitigate their environmental impact – not just reducing their air pollution, but reducing emissions in general to tackle climate targets. And a key way they are doing this is using more innovative energy sources for onsite equipment like mobile welfare units.

Eco-friendly welfare units such as the ECOXLi run on hybrid power systems that dramatically reduce their need for fuel – and therefore the emissions they produce. Using a next generation Lithium battery and full solar technology, they minimise the need for generator power whilst enabling long-life silent running.

The result? A cleaner, more hospitable site that helps tackle air pollution and forge a path for more sustainable approaches to construction.

With inflation reaching over 9% in the UK, the Bank of England has issued an “apocalyptic” warning about rising fuel costs. 

This could spell disaster for many construction businesses – especially those that rely on mobile welfare units, Vehicle Mounted Access platforms and a range of other motorised equipment.

But what if skyrocketing fuel prices became the catalyst for much-needed change in the industry? And what if the apparent crisis actually led businesses to a more cost-effective approach to fuel?

In this article, we explore these very possibilities, demonstrating how innovative ECO products can slash sites’ reliance on fuel. 

But first, let’s see how bad things really are when it comes to fuel costs.

How bad is the fuel crisis?

We began sounding the alarm on rising fuel prices in March of this year. New legislation on red diesel was threatening to double many contractors’ fuel costs, and we’ve since seen a rising wave of fuel theft.

But this has proven to be the tip of the iceberg. From supply chain shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine to the ongoing “cost of living crisis”, upwards pressure on most forms of fuel have been pervasive and intense.  

Petrol and diesel prices both hit new record highs in March – and then once again in May. Petrol was £0.34 more than the previous high of March, and Diesel was £0.39 more.

There is, of course, growing pressure on the government to provide relief for businesses and individuals suffering under the weight of inflation. But the reality is fuel prices are, in the words of a journalist, the “prisoner of geopolitics”. And experts expect the current situation to continue indefinitely.

We need long-term solutions

Many industry leaders have frantically lobbied for government support, or tried to access cheaper fuel sources. But these are already being revealed to be band-aid solutions.

Instead, businesses must seek long-term solutions – the most obvious of which would be to replace their existing vehicles with units that require radically less fuel.

Welfare Hire’s ECOXLi unit is a perfect example of how this can be done. Its hybrid system utilises next generation Lithium cell batteries and full solar technology enabling long-life silent running. And its Biofuel generator is used exclusively for recharge requirements, ensuring your fuel needs are minimised.

On top of that, the welfare unit features a user-friendly Smart Telemetry system that enables you to track and optimise your power usage, ultimately helping further minimise the need for fuel and carbon.

Welfare Hire can help you through

At Welfare Hire, we have developed our entire range of mobile welfare units, lighting units and welfare vans around these very issues. We help businesses not only reduce their reliance on fuel, but improve their onsite wellbeing, their environmental impact and their bottom line. 

If you’d like to learn more about our range, get in contact today.