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23
Nov
‘We’re on track to become the most sustainable in the UK’, says North Stainley concrete firm
“We’re on track to become the most sustainable concrete firm in the UK”, the commercial director at Lightwater Concrete told the Stray Ferret.
Hidden amongst woodland on the edge of model village North Stainley, sits a vast limestone quarry.
Lightwater Concrete is a major supplier of concrete, aggregate and sand, but it claims to put sustainability at the forefront of its values.
With a fleet of haulage vehicles and a myriad of industrial equipment, the Stray Ferret wanted to know just how sustainable an operation of this nature really is.
It all started in 1976, when a member of the Staveley family – which owns the company and surrounding estate – wanted to build a boating pond at the site and stumbled across a bedrock of limestone.
Now nearly 50 years later, it’s a major operation, producing around 30,000 tonnes of sand and aggregate every month, and 20,000 cubic metres of concrete per year.
Neil Harper, the firm's commercial director, told the Stray Ferret the firm blasts the limestone twice a month and excavates it daily. It’s then crushed by a solar-powered wash plant, which produces the sand and aggregate.
Mr Harper told the Stray Ferret:
Because of the wash plant, which we installed around 15 years ago, we realised it works really well with volumetrics – mix on site concrete.
This means we don’t have to transport the concrete to another plant, which can cause waste, or use additional haulage. We mix it here.
In the early 2000s, the Staveley family set up Concrete4U, which operates at the same site and produces ready-mixed concrete.
This means the firm can deliver a specified amount of concrete ordered to customers’ homes. Mr Harper said:
It means if people order three [cubic] metres, we deliver three metres and they only pay for three metres. Effectively, you pay for what you use. Our vehicles hold eight metres at a time, so we can do a 'milk round', and we don’t have to come back each time.
'We feel we're doing everything we can'
But the industry has not come without its fair share of tarnishing, especially since one significant ingredient of concrete is cement. In May, the BBC said if cement was a country, it would be the third-biggest source of CO2 emissions after China and the US, responsible for 7.5% of human-made CO2.
The Stray Ferret put this to Mr Harper, who told us Lightwater Concrete does not produce cement through the quarry, and instead imports it “as sustainably as we can”.
But he did acknowledge the cement industry’s contribution to carbon emissions and said the firm is doing all it can to offset its own carbon footprint:
All 14 of our vehicles run on HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) fuel. We have our on-site solar panels, which power around 80% of the estate. On a sunny day, it’s 100%. The extra energy we get is sustainably sourced too. We are effectively 100% renewable.
There’s no two ways about it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a product that can fully negate concrete’s carbon emissions. But everything we can control – like sourcing our own water, using solar power – we do.
We’re just striving to do more and more. I don’t think there’s another quarry that has a solar-powered wash plant.
We’re also looking at how we can grow our own HVO crop. We feel we're doing everything we can with solar farms and how the aggregate is made. The cement is really the last piece of the puzzle to solve, which the industry is working on.
The solar panels on site.
Mr Harper said the firm is also working to set up an anhydrite screed business. Anhydrite screed is a liquid binder, which Mr Harper says helps offset carbon productions, and is often used for underfloor heating or flooring.
“It also doesn’t use cement, which as we’ve said is really bad for the environment, so that was a conscious effort we’ve made towards sustainability”, Mr Harper added.
The Stray Ferret also asked Neil how much carbon the estate produces. He could not provide a figure, but said the firm is in the process of analyses:
We’re excited to get the results from those, as they should show we’re far more eco-friendly than our competitors.
Biodiversity
The Stray Ferret also asked Neil what Lightwater Concrete does to preserve biodiversity at the site.
He said:
We have a farm on the estate, which stopped ploughing years ago.
Willow coppices are also grown there, which go to the biomass furnaces to be turned into energy, and the two solar farms on-site too.
The biggest thing is our ethical farming, which we recently won awards for. We’ve also looked into how many trees we would have to plant to offset our carbon production.
According to Lightwater Concrete's website, lagoons have been formed at the quarry, which make ideal habitats for the great crested newt and peregrine falcons.
The quarry is also home to a colony of sand martins, which like to nest in vertical walls of sand.
The quarry.
The Stray Ferret asked Mr Harper what sets Lightwater Concrete and the rest of the estate apart. He said the Staveley family had been rooted in North Stainley for 500 years, and claimed the firm put its people at the centre.
We’re really well taken care of. In theory, you should go home happier than you were when you got to work – that’s what we want for staff.
We’re really proud of what we’re doing as a business – we’re probably doing double the aggregates we were doing two years ago. We’re supplying the Yorkshire Green Project, which is great, and we try supply projects that align with our values.
We’ve also been involved in the upgrade of York railway station, and we like to support local farmers in ensuring they’re buying the right materials at the right price. We've also done a lot with Ripon Walled Garden and we like supporting grassroots football.
The estate employs around 100 people, which is made up of the quarry, the farm, a pub and a B&B in the village.
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