Managing waste

Play Video

At Blackfriars we’re building a new station spanning the River Thames, and using barges to transport materials to and from site. Here Justine Kaye Mowe and the Blackfriars team explain more.

Minimising waste from the start

We believe that the first step in reducing waste is to design it out of our processes from the start, and to procure the products and materials with the lowest whole life-cycle impact. This is the purpose of our sustainable materials work (see related information).

Our waste

We have three main sources of waste:

• from construction, demolition and maintenance work
• from offices
• from our managed stations, which includes waste from trains whose services terminate at the station.

Construction and maintenance waste

In 2009/10, our National Delivery Service (NDS) logistics function handled approximately 1.48m tonnes of construction and maintenance waste such as concrete, steel rail and used ballast.

We re-used or recycled 90.3 per cent of this waste in 2009/10 – slightly lower than the 93.2 per cent achieved last year because during this year NDS handled more inert waste (which does not decompose, such as sand) which was sent to landfill.

Re-use/recycling/recovery

Enlarge

Re-use/recycling/recovery of waste managed by our National Delivery Service logistics function – on approximately 1.48m tonnes of waste in 2009/10.

	2008/09	2009/10
Actual	93.2	90.3
Target	95	95

Managed station waste recovery

Enlarge

Re-use/recycling/recovery of waste from our managed stations in 2009/10 – data from approximately 18,662 tonnes of waste.

Station name	% Re-Used/recycled/recovered Waste
Liverpool Street	38.1
Victoria	24.7
Waterloo	28.3
London Bridge	17.4
Euston	4.6
Kings Cross	0.1
Paddington	6.7
Cannon Street	47.4
Gatwick Airport	11.2
Birmingham	2.0
Leeds	54.9
Lime Street	23.6
Manchester	19.9
Glasgow	6.4
Edingurgh	9.1
TOTAL	18.7

Notes

1. Kings Cross station our improvement work has delayed the use of recycling facilities at this station because of space restrictions
2. Excludes St Pancras station this site is managed by CTRL on behalf of HS1
3. Excludes Fenchurch Street and Charing Cross stations we are awaiting waste data from the landlords of these sites.

Our aim is to achieve 95 per cent waste reuse, recycling or recovery handled by NDS by 2014.

Construction waste handled by our contractors

Our key construction contractors reported producing 785,500 tonnes of waste last year of which approximately 57 per cent was reused, recycled or recovered. We plan to improve this by working with them over the next few years and we aim to achieve a target of 80 per cent reuse, recycling or recovery of contractor managed waste.

Waste from buildings

In relation to the waste from our buildings, including managed stations, corporate offices, signalling centres and maintenance depots, approximately 18.8 per cent of the total volume of waste was re-used, recovered or recycled in 2009/10.

Our target is to achieve 60 per cent avoidance of landfill for waste from corporate offices, stations and maintenance depots by the end of March 2014.

For depots and stations, managing waste can be quite complex. For example, our depots collect litter and waste from flytipping, so part of our waste reduction strategy is to discourage flytipping by improving fencing, carrying out observation checks and by providing the British Transport Police with the evidence to prosecute offenders.

Our managed stations handle waste produced by commercial enterprises, station users, and trains. We are working with train operators and commercial enterprises at stations to encourage increased recycling, and to improve beyond our current managed station recycling rate of 21.2 per cent.