We manage over two million tonnes of waste per year. This comes mainly from our construction and track renewal and maintenance work, but also from our stations, offices and other operational sites such as depots and signal boxes.
By reducing the amount of waste generated by Network Rail (either directly by us, or by our contractors and tenants), and by recycling or reusing more of our waste, we can reduce both costs and our impact on the environment.
Our Corporate Responsibility Group have established six priority areas of focus for the coming year in terms of sustainability. One of these is waste, where we intend to develop a strategy to reduce the amount of waste we generate, both directly and from our contractors, working towards achieving zero waste to landfill.
We will be developing long term strategies for each of the six priority areas over the coming 12 months and will report fully on our progress in our next report.
- Carbon
- Climate change adaptation
- Waste
- Diversity
- Accessibility
- Biodiversity, ecology and land use
Waste from construction, maintenance and renewals projects
Nearly 98 per cent of the waste we generate comes from our construction and track maintenance and renewal projects – 2,076,259 tonnes in 2010/11. This is handled by our contractors (for example on construction projects) or by our internal logistics teams (for example for key infrastructure materials waste).
Working with our contractors on waste
For our construction projects in 2010/11, our contractors handled 811,713 tonnes of waste (2009/10: 785,500 tonnes). Our aim was to divert around 80 per cent of this waste from landfill, and this year we achieved 78 per cent (2009/10: approximately 57 per cent).
The environmental sustainability category in our annual Partnership Awards recognises our contractors, customers and suppliers who demonstrate excellence environmental performance including waste management and innovative ways of reusing waste. This year a number of entries to the awards highlighted good practice including high rates of diversion of the waste from landfill and the use of recycled aggregates.
Managing our key materials waste
As well as the waste handled by our contractors, we also focus on the track maintenance and renewal waste managed by our National Delivery Service (NDS) team. NDS act as an internal logistics function, transporting and disposing of key materials waste including steel rail, timber and concrete sleepers and ballast.
Our 2014 target for the waste handled by NDS is to divert 97 per cent from landfill. In 2010/11, we diverted 89.9 per cent of the 1,264,546 tonnes of waste generated (2009/10: 96.21 per cent diverted from landfill out of 1,486,035 tonnes generated). This is below our target, but we believe that this is a result of changes in our waste streams, with less of the waste from our current projects being suitable for diversion from landfill compared to last year.
In June 2011 we will open our new National Track Material Recycling Centre, managed by our NDS team. The centre will include a facility to wash our hazardous waste ballast to enable it to be used as a secondary aggregate product, as well as other facilities to prepare our waste materials for reuse on our network. We hope to see improvements over the coming year.
Waste from our operational sites
In 2010/11, we generated 44,965 tonnes of waste at our operational sites including offices, training centres, stations, maintenance depots, signal boxes and signalling control centres (2009/10: 33,308 tonnes). Of this, we diverted 28.0 per cent from landfill (2009/10: 18.8 per cent diverted from landfill). This was below our target of 40 per cent diversion from landfill for 2010/11. We hope that with our renewed focus on waste management we can improve our performance in the coming year.
Our long-term target for operational waste is to divert 60 per cent of waste from landfill from our managed stations, corporate offices and maintenance depots by 2014.
To help us towards our target for operational waste, in 2010/11 we reviewed a number of our waste management contracts. We now have challenging contractual targets around diversion of waste from landfill to incentivise our waste management contractors at our managed stations and maintenance depots.
Initiatives to increase recycling rates include, for example, working with retailers and train operators at our managed stations to improve signage on bins at Liverpool Street station and trial new recycling practices for the waste that comes off trains arriving into Victoria Station in London.
We are also working closely with our waste management contractor in our corporate offices to develop behaviour change plans for waste reduction, recycling and reuse.
Delays in installing new recycling equipment at our Westwood leadership development centre in Coventry have meant that this is now due to go live in 2011/12. We will report more fully on our approach to waste management in our next report.
1This differs from the previously published figure of 93.2 per cent for 2009/10 because new evidence was found during the reporting year to show that some inert waste was used at restoration sites, rather than landfilled. We did not have full confirmation of this at the time of our last report.