Products and services with environmental benefits

In addition to trying to reduce our own operational environmental impacts, our businesses offer a variety of techniques and services which can help their customers to meet their environmental needs.

In most of the regions where we work, we offer our customers a choice between traditional foundations and more sustainable alternatives. Many of our ground engineering techniques have lower environmental impacts than the more traditional foundation techniques with which they compete. For example, our stone columns, using only inert stone, are generally considered to be environmentally friendly alternatives to the steel or concrete products for which they are often substitutes.

Apart from stone columns, we commonly use other displacement systems, such as driven cast in situ piling and dynamic compaction, which create no spoil and therefore eliminate transport movements to and from landfill sites. The soft-facing reinforcing systems offered by our Phi business as an alternative to sheet piling also reduce the need to remove soil and replace with expensive filling. Instead, softwood timber can be used to create steeper retaining walls, enabling greater land use. All Phi’s timber is from a renewable material source, with a lower carbon footprint than sheet piling.

We are also looking into ways of reducing the amount of carbon content in our foundations solutions, such as increasing the proportion of recycled materials used, reducing our energy consumption where this is an option and increasing our use of locally sourced materials. Our UK business has made further progress in finding alternative aggregate sources for its vibro replacement products, having recently used crushed concrete, recycled glass and bottom waste incinerator ‘ash’, and now uses recycled aggregates in over 50% of its vibro foundations. It has also been providing support through the provision of equipment to Novacem, a spin out company from Imperial College, London, which has developed a carbon negative cement solution.

Carbon calculators and carbon offset

In the UK, for some time we have been offering customers calculations of the embodied carbon associated with our solutions and the ability to offset embedded carbon through the JP Morgan Climate Care scheme. This scheme supports low carbon sustainable developments, such as hydroelectric power, improved farming and techniques to reduce deforestation.

We hope to progressively extend this offering to more customers of Group companies and, to ensure a consistency of approach, our Carbon Committee has developed Group guidelines for calculating greenhouse gas emissions emitted by Keller products.

Products to stabilise the natural environment and for the environmental sector

Some Keller products are designed specifically to stabilise ground environmental conditions, such as techniques for slope stabilisation, decontamination or containment of contamination and the preparation of brownfield sites. We also continue to work on a significant number of land reclamation and dam remediation schemes.

In addition, Keller ground improvement products and services are often supplied to the environmental sector, such as wind energy and biofuel companies, and so are enabling the development of third parties’ environmentally beneficial technologies.