Communities
Objective
Make a positive contribution to our local communities
Goals
Develop lasting relationships with local communities and other stakeholders
Engage and inspire the next generation of skilled employees
Create opportunities for communities to connect to nature
“Volunteering events are an excellent way for our employees to give back to the local environment and are thoroughly enjoyed by all who attend. Access to nature is something we know is important for people’s mental health, so it is great to be able to offer this opportunity for our employees to take time away from their regular jobs and get outside whilst doing their bit for the environment.”
Steven Curtin, senior area operations manager at Tarmac
Tarmac seeks to be an integral part of local communities. We recognise we have an important role to play not only as a local employer but also a key member of the local community.
Highlights
Building stronger community relations
At Tarmac, we want our business to be seen as a positive addition to the areas in which we operate. We are committed to working with communities to reduce our impact on people who live nearby, and to play our part as an active member of our communities. All our sites are encouraged to complete a community engagement plan to identify their local stakeholders, their impacts on the local community and ways they can help in the area.
One way of achieving this is through our people volunteering to support local community groups and activities. In 2022, Tarmac employees completed 4,485 volunteering hours. This increased as Covid-19 restrictions eased. We are hoping to improve on this figure even more during 2023 with both higher volumes of activity and improved reporting.
Tarmac employees took part in four volunteering events with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust (YDMT), completing 483 volunteering hours between them. These events included tree planting, woodland maintenance, and the removal of 3,000 plastic tree guards for recycling as part of YDMT’s Plastic Free Woodland’s project. Tarmac is celebrating entering its fourth year of a ten-year partnership with Clapham-based Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust, which will see the education and development of 2,500 people from disadvantaged backgrounds and the completion of a staggering 7,700 hours of volunteering.
Tarmac also held four open days at our Mountsorrel Quarry, and over 3,000 local people attended to learn more about the site’s operations and our role as a sustainable business. Participants enjoyed a tour and learnt about how we extract and process materials and got to see the site’s new primary crusher.
The days were a great success and guests were particularly impressed with the quarry after seeing its size, scale and depth from the viewing platform. Days like these are an important part of our community engagement programme, to help local communities better understand what we do, why it’s important and how we work to protect the environment.
Supporting education and development of young people
The team at our Aberthaw cement plant in South Wales has been helping to inspire the next generation of construction works thanks to a recent donation to Jenner Park Primary School in Barry. The team helped to transform an area of the school’s grounds into a construction-themed play area. The Aberthaw plant manager also went to the school to officially open the play area and talked to some of the children about construction. The children were keen to learn more and then enjoyed having an opportunity to dress up and have a good exploration.
We also helped children at a local school understand more about our processes, plant and people by facilitating a special visit to our Thrislington Quarry. A class visited the site as part of their careers week, and the purpose of the trip was to give the students an overview of our safety culture along with information about our processes and the wide range of roles present within the sector.
Tarmac supported a class of year 8 pupils in Solihull by providing content for website development and helping celebrate the children’s efforts by contributing to a post-project prizegiving ceremony. We are now looking at ways we can build on our relationship with this school through engagement with other subjects too.
Solutions for the Planet
The 2021/22 academic year was our eighth year of partnership with Solutions for the Planet. Tarmac employees continued to provide mentoring and support to students from schools across the country to turn their big ideas into creative business plans and live projects, generating real solutions to sustainability challenges. In addition to the 22 Tarmac employee mentors who worked with schools, Tarmac employees also supported as judges for shortlisting, the regional finals and the national final, held at the Palace of Westminster in July.
Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund
We continued to donate to local charities and community projects through our Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund. In 2022 we made donations over £1 million to 52 community projects, with in-kind contributions of materials and labour and through contributions from the Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund.
As an example of this work, rare sand martins in Northamptonshire have been allowed to nest easy following a grant from the Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund to build bespoke nesting cabinets. The grant has enabled the Stanford Ringing Group (SRG) to establish a new 10 by 10 metre nesting area at the reservoir to encourage sand martins – a threatened species in the UK – to return to the area to breed, and boost biodiversity.
Through the Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund we also donated to Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust for a programme of conservation work to help restore two hectares of rare heathland habitat at Hertford Heath nature reserve.
Improving the local environment
Tarmac is committed to making a net positive contribution and restoring our sites to a better condition than when we acquired them. We do this by keeping our sites in good condition while they are operating as well as through thoughtful restoration at the end of operation.
Tarmac is proud to have planted over 17,000 trees at Panshanger Park in Hertfordshire, creating a new woodland as part of the Queen’s Green Canopy initiative in celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The initiative is restoring woodland areas and parkland in the northern part of the park that is currently used for arable farming.
In 2022, Kent Wildlife Trust celebrated over a quarter of a century managing Holborough Marshes nature reserve, a 35-acre nature reserve near Snodland, Kent, which is owned by Tarmac. Holborough Marshes is on the flood plain of the river Medway and has been classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for its diverse range of wildlife. Tarmac gave the management of the reserve to Kent Wildlife Trust in 1996, subsequently transforming the post-industrial land into a space for nature to thrive.
In late 2021, Tarmac donated 30 tonnes of gravel to the Wild Trout Trust charity, to help rewild local rivers and streams, such as the Haw Beck and Dauber Gill, in a bid to increase biodiversity in Yorkshire. A year since this donation, one stream, the Haw Beck – that runs alongside Tarmac’s Skipton Quarry – is seeing positive results, with trout numbers rising by 36%
Looking forward
For 2023, we are excited to continue to build on our existing community relationships and create new ones to ensure we are having a positive impact in the areas in which we operate. We are looking to update our community engagement policies to ensure we are working with and supporting our communities in the most effective way. We hope to continue growing volunteer hours across the business, through new opportunities and increasing visibility of the ways employees can get involved. We’re looking forward to completing our ninth academic year of partnering with Solutions for the Planet in 2023, and starting the tenth year of partnership. We will continue to encourage all our sites keep an active and up-to-date community engagement plan to maintain strong community relations and support the areas in which we operate.
