Community Resource Information Support Platform (CRISP) – an online marketplace for sharing resources

Background and industry context

Unsustainable use of resources affects the environment in a plethora of ways [1]. These impacts include resource depletion, energy consumption and emissions – from extraction of resources, production and transport, and land-use change, pollution and water stress from resource extraction [2]. Keeping resources in circulation helps to eliminate waste and simultaneously decreases the demand on virgin materials. As the built environment is the largest consumer of raw materials [3], it is clear why aiming for circular economy models is important.

The waste hierarchy is a framework which orders the preference of management of waste from most desirable to least desirable from an environmental sustainability viewpoint. Implementing the waste hierarchy is a legal obligation under the Waste Regulations 2011. This means that waste should be managed in the following order: reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, dispose. If prevention is not possible and waste has already arisen on site, reuse, followed by recycling, and finally recovery should be considered as the next best available methods.

In the UK in the early 1990s, there was little incentive to avoid landfill and consider alternative management routes. However, with the introduction of the Landfill Tax in 1996, local authorities and businesses were motivated to seek out other management options. Furthermore, in 2008, the Waste Framework Directive was adopted which made it a legal obligation to adhere to the waste hierarchy when making waste management decisions. Therefore, from the 1990s through the 2000s and beyond, a shift away from landfill and towards recovery, recycling and reuse can be observed. Figure 1 illustrates this change.

The construction industry consistently generates about 60 million tonnes of waste each year [5] in the UK. The recovery rate for construction and demolition waste has remained comfortably above the 70% target as required by the Waste Framework Directive. Although the recovery rate is high, more work is needed around improving the fate of waste up the hierarchy and to improve circulation of those materials suitable for reuse. The recovery rate in the UK has sat above 90% for several years, but the proportion of resources that are sent straight for recovery or disposal without ever being used remains between 10-15% [6].

Waste can arise as a result of poor planning, programme pressure and overordering. There has been extensive work in the construction industry to reduce waste and increase re-use and recycling, but the industry has reached a plateau in progress [5].

Often, there is no formal channel for resource re-use within construction projects. This makes it difficult to maintain a valid inventory of materials and assign value to those items available for re-use. On-site workers utilise messaging apps and informal discussions to share items. Therefore, there is no visibility for other job functions such as quantity surveyors and buyers. This lack of transparency means they are unable to accurately determine if the resources already exist on site, hindering the process of reuse.

Approach

High Speed Two (HS2) is one of the largest and most complex infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the UK. Balfour Beatty VINCI (BBV) is the joint venture organisation undertaking the northern section of the project, building the railway between Long Itchington Wood and past Birmingham at the West Coast Main Line tie-in just past Litchfield. There are over 80 compounds situated over 8 sub-lots across a 90km stretch.

HS2 have mandated that 95% of construction and demolition waste must be diverted from landfill. There is an additional resource efficiency target that stipulates no more than 7.1 tonnes of construction waste should be produced per £100,000 spend. The challenge for BBV was to meet these targets, to reduce the amount of virgin material utilised on the project and reduce the energy intensity of our resources. The complexity and scale of this project provided a good opportunity to invest in a system to help achieve these benefits.

International Synergies Ltd (ISL) is the creator of the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP). NISP is a programme which was funded by the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), allowing companies to identify mutually profitable transactions for resources that were underused or undervalued. This same design was adapted for use on HS2 for BBV. In partnership with ISL, BBV created a platform called Community Resource Information Support Platform (CRISP) as shown in Figure 2.

CRISP acts as an online marketplace where each sublot can add ‘haves’ and ‘wants’ to the platform. They can add details of resources they no longer require on site, together with photos, specifications, and warranties. Equally, if a site requires resources, they can add what items they would like to receive or see posted. After a specified time, if no match has occurred between the sublots, the user is then able to offer the resource out to the supply chain or community groups that have been onboarded through the community engagement team.

Users are able to log on to the system and look for an item manually or can use the advisor function. The advisor function utilises machine learning where it identifies which items are usually matched manually, improving its future suggestions as more matches are executed. When a match is identified, the resource owner is notified via email.

Below are two images showing the resource display (Figure 1) and a completed match between two sites (Figure 2).

Those users with additional permissions, known as superusers, can run reports to evaluate how users are engaging with the system, how many matches have completed, what the top searched items are, the environmental and financial outcomes, and more.

A phased roll-out has been adopted by the project team to ensure smooth adoption of the system following a pilot scheme. The stages have been as follows:

• A series of awareness sessions delivered to foster interest across the project.
• Relevant users are identified based on job function.
• The system is set up for these users and the team visit site to deliver training.
• A site visit held to identify resources to upload.
• Ongoing sessions to provide continued support for users.

For the system to work, buy in is required from many functions including procurement, site managers, stores people and the community engagement team. The processes have been adapted to reflect this, for example when a requisition is raised, buyers are required to first check the system to identify if the item exists on site already. The platform is linked with BBV’s financial system to enable accurate cost analysis and to enable the team to search items based on the system codes.

Some site workers are aware of the savings from reusing resources, if not the environmental benefits. This has led to informal channels of communicating surplus materials being utilised such as messaging services. Although beneficial, there is a lost opportunity to record, quantify and share best practice of these transactions across the project.

Outcomes

The pilot conducted in 2021 saw 28 active users across two construction sites. A total of 123 items were reused resulting in estimated savings in the region of £3,200.

During the current roll out phase, BBV has 94 active users. Some items that have been reutilised include the donation of over 700 Perspex screens and metal brackets to a school for their workshop. This equates to saving the school about £30,000 and BBV approximately £1,000 in disposal fees.

Recent examples of resource exchanges between sites include manhole rings, over 100 pallets, office furniture, fencing and drainage materials.

As a project, BBV estimates that over a £1,000,000 can be saved through reutilising items on site.

Learnings and recommendations

A key learning from this project is that implementing an innovation such as CRISP would be more easily adopted if ingrained during the early stages of the programme. Imposing change on staff on a mature project with established processes and procedures has presented challenges. BBV has seen some resistance to adoption from individuals who, although appreciating the value of the system, deemed it an additional duty above and beyond their role description. Identifying key individuals who are eager and willing to assist is essential. It would have been useful to assign the management of the platform to specific job roles and by formally binding it in job descriptions.

Therefore, it would be advisable to tie in the success of the system into bonus structures, performance development reviews and targets for which senior managers are accountable for.

Delivery teams juggle competing priorities. For some, the programme will take precedence. Time or space constraints means the priority to remove items from site quickly to enable construction overshadows the opportunities that reusing items could provide. Therefore, the long-term value of resources is overlooked. If CRISP had been embedded into the site setup, where planning compounds included not only a stores area, but a storage area for items to be reutilised, a barrier to adoption would have been removed.

By embedding CRISP into processes and procedures related to daily activities on site, no additional burden would be seen in an already pressured environment. To further this, CRISP would be even more valuable if hosted as a mobile app as well as an online cloud-based platform. This would assist site teams in streamlining the process and reduce any administrative burden. It was BBV’s intention to have CRISP as a mobile app but security restrictions imposed by one of the parent companies meant that the app could not be loaded onto devices of those employees; no workaround could be identified. Therefore, BBV had to adapt the platform to be web based to allow access to all employees within the joint venture.

A further lesson learnt is that the roll out has required more resource than originally anticipated. For future projects looking at implementing a similar system, implementation would benefit from dedicated resource to manage. It was discovered early on that due to the fluid nature of large infrastructure projects, staff turnover has led to higher than anticipated training frequency. This means that a consistent programme of training is required to maintain knowledge and engagement.

Finally, BBV realised later in the roll out of the system that the environmental outcomes were difficult to quantify. Without having a database of commonplace construction items and their associated carbon quantities, the resource required to calculate the environmental benefit is prohibitive.

Conclusion

CRISP is a user-friendly platform which tracks the environmental and financial benefits of re-use on site, whilst operating in accordance with circular economy principles. It allows both supply chain members and community groups to gain from BBV’s resources. Embedding processes and procedures related to CRISP into the organisation is vital for its success. This will be more effective if actioned before works begin. Planning for adequate resource, responsibility and space will assist in the efficient roll out across an organisation.

Acknowledgements

Lyndon Trinder

Simon Thorne

Geeth Jyonthilal

Magda Wojnarowska

Philip Bradley

Ian Humphreys

James Woodcock

References

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[2] Tenkorang E Y. Environmental Governance in Gold Mining: The Role of Traditional Institutions in Asutifi North District of Ghana. SAGE Open. 2023. 13(2).

[3] ZImmann R, O’Brien H, Hargrave J, Morrell M. The Circular Economy in the Built Environment. 2016. [Accessed 29 February 2024].

[4] HM Government (2018) OUR WASTE, OUR RESOURCES: A STRATEGY FOR ENGLAND

[5] Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. UK statistics on waste 2023 [Accessed 29 February 2024].

[6] Acharya D, Boyd R, Finch O. From principals to practices: First steps towards a circular built environment. 2018. [Accessed 29 February 2024].