The 15th June is Clean Air Day 2023! It’s the UK’s largest air pollution campaign and with up to 36,000 deaths a year in the UK as a result of air pollution, it’s never been more important to strive for improvement and change.
Clean Air Day is a Global Action Plan initiative. In 2017, they partnered with a number of UK City Councils to launch the campaign and since then it’s gone from strength to strength. It’s just one of many things Global Action Plan is involved in to improve air quality and decrease pollution.
The campaign shines a spotlight on air pollution and the serious effects it is having on human health as well as wildlife and the environment. It’s a great way of harnessing the attention of new audiences and informing more people about the importance of doing our bit.
Businesses and organisations can play an active role in raising awareness of the need for clean air, taking action to improve air quality in and around their estate by making changes and improving their operations to meet this need.
At TJ, we do a range of things to ensure we’re lessening the effects of air pollution on our staff, customers, local communities and the wider environment. It is our intention to reduce our carbon footprint by signing up to a carbon credit scheme to offset our usage. It is likely that we’ll enter into a commitment to plant a tree for every skip sold and for 100 tonnes of aggregate sold too.
We utilise recycled aggregates wherever we can, substituting primary materials for the recycled equivalent when appropriate and when supply allows. Our location on the south coast means that we’re some distance from many of the traditional quarrying regions and so by using recycled alternatives, we’re reducing miles travelled and in turn, emissions.
We invite commercial third parties to dispose of their unwanted rubble at our Butser Quarry and it is this, along with rubble and hardcore from our own projects, that we use to make our recycled aggregate iBlend. This service and product not only provides a readily available aggregate for bulk fill, but it also diverts rubble from landfill, where it might otherwise end up.
Our IT system, Fissara Move, was designed specifically for us and offers the ideal solution as it can be utilised on the move, via Samsung Galaxy tablet devices. It is also used by office-based employees on desktop computers, improving communication between the two parties.
This improved two-way communication enables us to lower our carbon emissions as office staff are able to route our drivers – on both the Waste and Transport sides – more accurately and maintain communication with them at all times. This means that as and when things change, this can be communicated to the drivers immediately, eliminating unnecessary journeys and resulting in fewer wasted miles.
Our entire fleet is on a rolling renewal scheme, which means our vehicles are always modern and well-maintained and no vehicle is over five years old. It’s a fact that newer vehicles are more efficient and produce lower emissions; this is something that we take very seriously in our operations and that we’re very mindful of.
We’ve launched an initiative to provide electric company cars for key members of staff in a bid to ensure internal travel is being done in the most economical way possible. So far we have equipped three employees with cars; these staff members are in roles that require them to travel between sites as well as visiting clients during the working day.
The cars are fully electric and we’ve installed charging points at our different sites to ensure they can recharge their batteries wherever they go. By cutting out fossil fuels for regular travel, we hope to significantly reduce our company carbon footprint, resulting in positive environmental effects.
Explore the services TJ Transport and TJ Waste provides…
