Lafarge Tarmac has achieved the international energy management standard, ISO 50001, across its Cement and Lime division. It’s the first step in rolling the certification out across its entire UK business by the end of 2015, the company said in a statement today.

ISO 50001 provides organisations with a framework to manage and improve their energy performance, while enhancing operational efficiencies, decreasing energy intensity and reducing environmental impacts.

Over the past year, Lafarge Tarmac has worked to bring each of its cement and lime plants in line with the ISO 50001 energy management system and in doing so has become the first UK operator to achieve this certification across its cement and lime operations.

Dr Martyn Kenny, Sustainability Director for Lafarge Tarmac explains: “We’re committed to reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all operations. This achievement reflects our continued efforts to ensure our solutions are as sustainable as possible: from the way our materials are produced, through to how they perform in use and at their end of life. We know it’s important to customers, because the properties and whole life performance of our solutions can help them manage energy and carbon in the built environment, and achieve more sustainable projects."

He adds: “We’ll now take the best practice learning from our Cement and Lime business, and use it to help us with our business-wide roll-out.”
 
David Shenton, Senior Environmental Manager at Lafarge Tarmac’s Cement and Lime business, who led the project, said: “We’re really proud to have gained ISO 50001. Our employees deserve huge credit, as they played a crucial role in identifying, understanding and driving our efforts to conserve and reduce energy consumption.”

To achieve the standard, each of Lafarge Tarmac’s cement and lime sites built on its existing programmes to formulate a new plan to demonstrate how further energy efficiency would be delivered, and how technology and improved ways of working would contribute to these efforts. Each site set up energy committees to encourage greater awareness of the role employees play in reducing on-site energy consumption and implementing energy efficiency initiatives.