Sustainable materials and procurement

Influencing our supply chain to implement sustainable procurement strategies

Sustainable materials and sustainable procurement was the one of the most challenging areas of delivering Thameslink Programme. In the early stages our major station projects such as Blackfriars and Farringdon were successful in implementing sustainable procurement strategies however other parts of the TLP struggled to influence the supply chain.

The Blackfriars and Farringdon Station project teams and suppliers Balfour Beatty and Costain developed material use plans to identify their top materials and took action to make more sustainable choices in relation to those materials during the design process. The top materials were assessed against a set of sustainability criteria during the design phase which was integrated into the procurement process. At Farringdon the project team and Costain undertook sustainable procurement supply chain audits of key materials and measured their performance against the British Standard (BS8903) for Sustainable Procurement in Construction.

Improving our approach to sustainable materials and procurement

As TLP entered the latter stages of the programme a Responsible Sourcing Policy and procedure was rolled out across TLP and the supply chain to improve our approach to sustainable materials and sustainable procurement thus increasing our CEEQUAL scores.

At London Bridge responsible sourcing issues were considered much earlier in the design phase where the project team and Costain committed to a number of actions: 

• Maximising the use of recycled and secondary aggregates in structural concrete 
• Use of recycled materials such as ground- granulated furnace slag (GGBS) and fly Ash (PFA) as a replacement for ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) in the structural concrete 
• 100% certified timber 
• Responsible sourcing of structural steel, reinforcement and concrete 
• Specification of materials not containing environmentally harmful.

Since implementing these improvements Thameslink Programme successfully delivered on its sustainable materials and sustainable procurement objective.