United House

Sustainability

Environmental initiatives to help care for communities

Sustainability is at the heart of United House. It is through our sustainable approach to the activities we undertake that we believe we have the resilience to innovate and progress.

We believe that our ability to adapt and innovate through our understanding of our product and our service helps us fully appreciate the life cycle of our business.

Key to our approach is our Sustainability Policy which currently sets out our ongoing strategy for the next two years.

Our long term sustainability objectives are:

  • Reduce the environmental impact of the product that we provide
  • Reduce the impact of our projects on the communities in which we work
  • Halve our waste to landfill by 2012 (based on 2008 baseline)
  • Reduce our carbon emissions by 2% year on year
  • Improve the competence of our staff, with 75% of site staff to achieve NVQ level 2 or equivalent by 2012
  • Support industry development initiatives such as Construction Ambassadors.

Our commitments and involvement in the sustainable agenda are supported through our membership of the following organisations:

With the introduction of the Climate Change Act (2008) and the supporting regulatory processes such as Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) and Feed in Tariffs (FITs), carbon remains a key focus for both United House and society in general.

Sustainable development means reducing the environmental impact of our construction and refurbishment operations and taking real steps to reduce carbon emissions from our offices, warehouse, transportation and on our sites.

Building and working in sustainable ways is vitally important, but sustainability also extends to the communities in which we work, helping to improve the quality of life by providing well designed homes in vibrant mixed neighbourhoods, with better opportunities for employment, education, healthcare and leisure.

Our sustainable construction activity can be broken down into the two main categories of new build projects and low carbon refurbishment.

Sustainable Materials

On the Barking & Dagenham new build project we are using a new sustainable road surfacing material called Foambase™. Supplied by OCL Regeneration as a replacement for conventional hot mix and binder course for the new roads constructed as part of phases 1 and 3a of the contract, Foambase™ has lower embodied carbon properties than traditional materials, which use a lot of energy and CO2. It uses recycled asphalt and macadam, less hot material and can be laid by hand rather than machine.

Click here to access our low-carbon retrofit website