Environmental Policy

We believe that businesses are responsible for achieving good environmental practice and operating in a sustainable manner. We are therefore committed to reducing our environmental impact and continually improving our environmental performance as an integral and fundamental part of our business strategy and operating methods. We encourage our customers, suppliers and all business associates to do the same.  Not only is this sound commercial sense for all; it is also a matter of delivering on our duty of care towards future generations.

Our policy is to:

  • Wholly support and comply with or exceed the requirements of current environmental legislation and codes of practice.
  • Ensuring activities are carried out with minimal impact on local communities and not creating a nuisance to our neighbours
  • Minimise our waste and then reuse or recycle as much of it as possible.
  • Minimise energy and water usage in our buildings, vehicles and processes in order to conserve supplies, and minimise our consumption of natural resources, especially where they are non-renewable.
  • Monitoring fuel use and maintaining plant to enable fuel efficiency
  • Training employees and raising awareness with procedures and responsibilities
  • As far as possible purchase products and services that do the least damage to the environment and encourage others to do the same.

Biodiversity. We have always gone well beyond what is required by legislation for biodiversity protection. Our Quarry is rich in biodiversity, with a mix of undisturbed refuges, unimproved grassland, and disturbed soils providing rich habitats unavailable in surrounding agricultural land. Our land has had no chemical inputs in living memory, and the rich flora and fauna of the site is greatly valued by all who work here. We work to ensure that we continually improve and protect the habitats we have on site, with particular focus on rare and endangered species which proliferate on sandy soils, and disturbed margins. We maintain a SSSI area on site, and are currently working on a cinnabar moth project, introducing them as a natural control for ragwort, and a bumblebee project.

Energy Consumption. Energy use – especially electricity use, is the largest part of our ‘carbon footprint’. We are actively working to reduce energy costs, and will continually improve our energy efficiency in order to reduce this impact. It makes business sense to reduce these costs, but doing so requires considerable investment. Our responsibility to future generations weighs heavily in the decision in where to invest.

Noise. We have been operating since 1959 on the site with few complaints. We work hard to avoid noise nuisance. Noise is minimised by designing yard and quarry to baffle any noise, and by limiting working hours.

Dust. Dust can be a problem on dry, windy days, and we continually monitor levels of blown dust at ten monitoring stations around the site to ensure that we keep an eye on any long term effects of inevitable changes in face design, handling and yard design.. On those days where we believe dust may be becoming a problem, we wet the haul roads with a water bowser, unsing recycled rainwater. Vehicle speed are kept low (5mph), and we train our drivers to ensure loads are sheeted to prevent blown dust during transport.

Light pollution. We rarely work outside daylight hours, except for the very shortest days of winter, so light pollution is kept to a minimum. We really like the stars here too.

Water Use. Our processes are designed to collect and recycle rainwater so as to require almost no water input. Settlement lagoons allow the silts and clays washed from our sands to drop out, before the clean water is pumped up to the plant for another round of washing. A water storage area in the middle of the quarry is used to collect run-off and return it to the water table.

Waste production. We do all the usual things to minimise waste, and indeed our on-site production of waste is minimal. We have invested much effort in ensuring that our processes minimise waste sand, making as much out of our sands as possible valuable and saleable – again, we believe this is simply sound business sense, but it is unusual in our industry, required considerable investment and technical development, and is the direct cause of our unusually wide range of sand grades.