More Voices from Action Sustainability's February Conference

At Action Sustainability's first conference - Sustainable Procurement - The New Era - which took place on Thursday 10 February at Sainsburys' headquarters in Holborn, London, the day began with breakfast, sponsored by British Precast, where they launched their new initiative "Raising the Bar".  Their Chief Executive, Martin Clarke, explained that from May 2011, all their members would be required to sign up to the British Precast Charter Scheme, which sets out challenging targets to improve wellbeing within the industry, as well as reduce carbon dioxide emissions and waste.  For more information about their Charter Scheme, please click here.

The conference commenced with an excellent keynote speech from Peter Head, who is both the Head of Global Planning at Arup, as well as the Chair of the Institute for Sustainability.  His presentation focused on future models for a sustainable world.  You can watch Peter talking about his presentation byclicking here, where he outlines the concept for innovative new funding model for community regeneration projects and talks about how it could work in practice, using a rapid change process of retrofit, which would be delivered by a social enterprise and funded via a community pension scheme.

Peter's presentation was followed by several panel discussions, including an animated discussion on the challenges faced by the Construction sector over the next 5 years and you can listen to an interview with one of the panel members - Andy MacAskill of Skanska.  In the interview, Andy talks about Skanska's objectives regarding sustainable procurement, the drivers and the impacts of their multi-million pound business.  He goes on to discuss the financial benefits of embedding sustainability into Skanska and how they identify innovators in sustainability products that can be integrated into their future supply chain.  To watch Andy's interview please click here.

Action Sustainability has put together a 3-minute video montage of the conference, which showcases the activities during the day, which you can watch by clicking here.

Finally, rather than handing out paper delegates' packs on the day, Action Sustainability produced a DVD containing the materials relating to the event.  The DVD was kindly sponsored by Plastic Surgeon and you can view a video outlining the nature of their work by clicking here. 

STOP PRESS: Look out for the next edition of the Action Sustainability newsletter, where more highlights from the conference's panel discussions will be featured.

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