Pathway To Social Acceptability

Mike Foster, executive director, RMC Group, gave the following keynote speech at The Institute of Quarrying’s 2003 annual conference symposium in Newport, South Wales

The theme for this year’s conference is the pathway to social acceptability for the extraction industry. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to start by looking at what is meant by the term social acceptability.

Corporate social responsibility is nothing new. It may not have been called that before, but behaving responsibly and looking after your employees and the communities you operate in is something that some companies have been concerned with for a number of years. At RMC, for example, we have been involved in quarry remediation for over 20 years.

What is new, however, is an increasing awareness of corporate behaviour by society at large. This new spotlight on business is exposing its reaction to the challenge of higher expectations, and those companies that fail to meet these expectations may find that their very ‘licence to operate’ comes under threat.

We should not underestimate the impact that quarrying can have on the environment and the economy of a country. Today in Wales over 20 million tonnes of sand, gravel and crushed rock are either excavated or dredged and landed every year.

As a consequence, it is even more vital for our industry than many others to demonstrate that we are committed to enhancing our acceptability, if we wish to maintain our ‘licence to operate’.

So how should we go about achieving acceptability? A good starting point is for companies to identify their main business impacts on society.

In the case of our industry, which is an inherently hazardous one, I personally believe that first and foremost in importance is the health and safety of our employees, the people who contract to us and the third parties exposed to our operations and products. And, of course, the well-being of the public.

I would like to congratulate the Government and the HSE for launching their ‘Revitalising Health and Safety’ campaign a few years ago. This initiative focused minds and has made a real difference to our industry in particular. As you will all be aware, because of the historically poor record of the quarrying industry and our desire to improve, we have signed up to tougher injury reduction targets than many other industries, and I was pleased to hear recently that our industry is on course to achieve at least a 50% reduction by the target date in 2005.

Frankly, we don’t deserve to be in business unless we continue to improve our performance in this area. Furthermore, we won’t attract the quality of employees that we all need unless they feel assured of their well-being.

At RMC we have a health and safety management structure across the Group that follows the HSE model ‘Successful Health and Safety Management’. I chair our Board Health and Safety Committee and one important decision we have taken has been to place health and safety as the first item on the agenda at all management meetings worldwide. More recently we have signed up to a concordat with the HSE to work in partnership to help them target their efforts where needed most and to help us to continually improve our standards.

Complacency is not acceptable, and while we must always strive to improve our performance, we must also learn from our experiences. Earlier this year RMC produced a video highlighting the importance of safe driving. This followed a plea to the Group to do what it could to improve safety in this area by Cynthia Barlow, whose daughter Alexandra tragically died after an RMC truck was in collision with her bicycle. The video, which has been endorsed by the Driving Standards Agency, will be used as a training tool throughout the Group and for external use by the industry.

In addition to health and safety we need to consider our relation-ship with local communities. It should of course be said that our industry contributes hugely to local communities, providing employment, skills transfer and the economic benefit associated with our presence.

At the same time, however, we must address local concerns through an open and transparent dialogue. There are many ways of maintaining this dialogue, whether through quarry liaison groups, open days, links with charities or educational visits for schools. In one example health and safety has been linked with local community needs — funds were raised by RMC quarry workers after they notched up 1,500 days without a ‘lost-time’ accident. The quarry workers efforts were rewarded by RMC who agreed to make a donation for each year worked without a lost-time accident to an organization of the employees’ choice. In this instance local schoolchildren were the beneficiaries, with their school receiving a donation towards a new playground cover.

A third issue which I would suggest is vitally important for our industry is our impact on the environment. Sustainable development is becoming a pivotal issue and is essential to the long-term survival of an industry such as ours.

Adequate supplies of raw materials and stable operating conditions are essential for a company to produce a sustainable return on its investments and resources over time. Incorporating sustainable development issues into business operations is also crucial to maintaining the licence to operate which I referred to earlier.

Commitment to sustainable development issues in our industry means looking beyond the company’s immediate business impacts and seeking out opportun-ities that go beyond compliance.

One example where we as a company have identified such an opportunity is in the development of a new product called Glasphalt. By recycling waste glass into new road surfaces, Glasphalt allows several thousand tonnes of glass to be saved each year from being deposited in landfill sites.

Many people are aware of the positive examples of quarry remediation, where companies have developed a positive approach that builds remediation into long-term planning before any form of extraction has begun.

However, fewer people may appreciate that active quarries often provide rare and protected sites for a wide variety of species. There are many examples within RMC where we are working in partnership with NGOs to protect local habitats and wildlife, and not just in the UK. In Poland, for example, RMC are collaborating with the Polish Bird Protection Society to protect a white stork sanctuary.

This is one of only a handful of such sanctuaries in Europe. Our aim is to protect the 20 breeding pairs that arrive annually from around the world so that numbers do not suffer as the EU Common Agriculture Policy is implemented when Poland joins the European Union in 2004.

At global level RMC have recently entered a partnership with Birdlife International, whereby we will work together on shared priorities, exchanging skills and information.
Essentially we are a simple business. We satisfy the growth needs of the community through the supply of our raw materials and yet need to meet the ever-growing demands placed on us by that same community to perform in a more sustainable way.

I believe we are, as an industry, on the path towards social acceptability. It was encouraging to hear the Minister for Environment in the National Assembly for Wales, Carwyn Jones, quoted recently as saying that ‘A high standard of restoration of worked-out quarries is essential and I am pleased that most operators have accepted their responsibilities.’

The road is not an easy one however. We need to work harder to improve our performance, be more transparent in our dialogue with stakeholders and then smarter to make sure we communicate the extent of our efforts.