Sustainability in Landscape Projects: A Historic Overview of Materials and Industry Change
Since starting out in landscaping almost sixty years ago, when the majority of construction materials were either second-hand or relatively low-quality when compared with modern products, I and other landscapers were obliged to work with those that were available locally in the main. We did not consider then that what we were doing was sustainable, but practical and logical.
Paving slabs for example, were either cheap compacted cement/sand units, usually 45cm x 45cm x 37mm from manufacturers such as Marley, square-edged and designed to be laid butt jointed over a screed of sand and cement, with a low density and crushing strength, suitable only for domestic pathways and patios.
In a limited range of colours – buff, grey, yellow and red, they quickly lost their newness once subjected to weather and sunlight.
Or wet-mix concrete slabs from firms such as Riverside Concrete or Daux Paving Slabs, often small local businesses using flint aggregate ballast, prone to high levels of ironstone, causing brown rust marks on the surface, and frequently, through the whole body of the slab.
Second-hand materials were available – today referred to as reclaimed – including broken grey concrete (ex-council footpath) 50mm slabs used as crazy paving, laid over concrete for use as driveways or sand and cement for footpaths and patios.
In modern parlance, these would all have been classed as sustainable, as they were locally produced with little or no haulage involved, using local quarries for aggregates and labour, which minimised any environmental impacts with relatively long-term functions.
Working tools were mainly hand-held, with few mechanical or electrical machines, often manufactured by local blacksmiths, designed for the purpose and local stone (some materials were dense and hard, such as York-stone, granite and Purbeck.
We were sustainable without knowing it.
1980s – 1990s and Onwards
At the start of the 80s, a new and much wider range of paving slabs appeared in the market, now with more colours, often replicating natural stone with a size range of 30cm x 30cm up to 90cm x 90cm with five or more intermediate sizes, in wet-mix concrete, they transformed landscaping design.
Initially made with flint aggregate, which was difficult to cut with carbon blades (before diamond blades) fitted to mechanical circular saws, as the blade skipped across the surface due to the hardness of the flint. This was changed to limestone, making life much easier.
Other paving slabs, in hexagonal or octagonal shapes, some replicas of basket-weave brick and tiles on edge came into the market, offering a whole new world of opportunities.
Town and Country Paving, Marshalls Mono, Bradstone and others produced millions of slabs, with life-style and life-stage being the operative buzz-words at the time. Catalogues and brochures displayed hundreds of products and styles for an eager market.
Personally, I worked for Bradstone for over twenty years as their preferred landscaper, building sets and gardens for their photographs across the country, together with nearly all of their Student Designed Chelsea Flower Show gardens, working closely with the company in developing new products and experimenting with ideas during the mid-80s up to early 00s.
At no stage did we ever consider the environment or sustainability on any of the projects or ideas, concentrating on new products and uses across the landscape construction sector, or if Bradstone did have any thoughts, they never mentioned them to myself.
1990s – Changes Were Under Way
In the early 90s, I was invited to become the instructing member of the Traditional Paving Development Group based at the University of the West of England (UWE) Frenchay Campus in the Faculty of The Built Environment, working with some of the most senior members of the paving industry, including Michael Heap of CED Stone Ltd and Mike Astin, Natural Stone Manager for Marshalls, under the auspices of Richard Guise from the Faculty.
The group was established to highlight and reinforce the sensible logic of using natural stone for all public works as appropriate, due to their inherent longevity. With asphalt roads having a working life of between fifteen and twenty years before requiring resurfacing – five times in a century – when compared with natural stone setts, blocks and slabs, which are likely to last over one hundred years, savings could be made to the public purse.
In 1997, I was invited to speak at the Streetscape Exhibition at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London, which was quite the scariest thing I have ever done! Twenty minutes to talk to a large audience of engineers, architects and planners, chiding them for being short-sighted and failing to see the savings to be made in specifying natural stone, local to an area, showing a range of cost savings including transport and the requirement to replace surfaces so often.
Being nervous, I openly challenged the room to look at the environmental elements of using long-life local materials and save public money at the same time.
Without realising it, I was becoming a champion for sustainability!
And yet…………also in 1997, at the Chelsea Flower Show, I laid the first batch of Indian sandstone on the McAlpine Homes Garden (Silver Gilt) which I designed and built using a ‘new’ product introduced into the UK by Mike Webb, of Silverlands Stone. This was the first time that paving slabs specifically aimed at the domestic landscape industry which had travelled thousands of miles by sea were shown – the beginning in an explosion in imported natural stone that was to transform the marketplace – and change the way the landscape industry treated the products, costing a quarter of the price of indigenous sandstone.
2010 to Today
Although I have majored on paving and natural stone as the most important materials of my career, there have been many changes in the quality of others, including timber in its many forms.
New classes were introduced, each with increasing life spans, using a class system, based on structural qualities, known as ‘C’ classes. C16 for instance, is a softwood, is suitable for general construction purposes, whilst C24 is higher quality, denser timber with few knots, ideal for heavy-duty load bearing applications.
C30, C50 and C70 are grades for hardwoods, categorised by their density and bending strength. Those timbers destined to be used in ground as posts or supports require a high durability which is supplied by heavy preservative treatments, known as Class 4 (UC4) or (UC5) against rot and insect attack.
‘Timbers’ now included a wide range of composite decking materials, many made from wood chips or saw dust blended with recycled plastics, usually HDPE, polyurethane or PVC.
Paving now includes a wide range of porcelain products, created at extremely high temperatures around 1300 degrees Celsius. These require laying using a range of chemical products including a bonding agent slurry and resin based grout.
All of these products and their uses are a far cry from those commonly used fifty years ago. Many of them cannot easily be recycled, due to density and strength.
What to make of all this history?
As with all things, there are inexpensive entry-level products which are not expected to last for more than a few years. Cheap, uncalibrated paving, timber sawn to approximate sizes and left untreated, hollow lengths of decking boards, low-grade artificial grass matting and plastic fencing products are prevalent in the marketplace, yet all come with a high environmental footprint. Perversely, the cheaper the product, the higher the damage caused by short life spans and high chemical manufacturing methods.
Sustainability is a hot-topic in the world of professional landscaping, with all three main trade associations – The Association of Professional Landscapers, British Association of Landscape Industries and The Society of Garden and Landscape Designers, all striving to reduce the amount of environmental damage caused by using ‘landscaping’ materials.
In simple terms, costs to the environment and finances are inter-related inasmuch as the higher the quality of certain products – porcelain for example – the higher the manufacturing costs due to the use of energy expended, the longer the likely life of the product, which can reduce the actual long-term (100 year timescale mentioned in the opening paragraphs for natural stone when weighed against asphalt) cost to the environment and purse-strings in the long run.
The Customer Conundrum
I have been involved in many hundreds of projects, both personally and as an expert witness for over thirty years, and seen at first-hand how client/contractor interviews are conducted.
Despite the pressure placed on garden designers and landscape contractors, I have never heard of any instance of the customer being invited to consider the environmental impact of having their garden landscaped. (Some designers will not contemplate artificial grass as a matter of principle, yet happily specify porcelain paving, which is far more damaging due to manufacturing processes).
Most professional landscapers practice a range of environmental disciplines, such as using battery powered tools to prevent fumes and noise pollution, green waste management, recycling everything possible, and running electric vehicles as a matter of course, everyone trying to make a difference.
A whole industry has grown up around sustainability for running the business, but there remains a large void between the necessary involvement in getting the customer on board when it comes to specifying materials and working practices on site.
A contractor can run a sustainable business, but unless the project itself is included in the mix, it can count for very little.
Despite the calls from the Government to reduce our carbon footprint, many of the rules and regulations surrounding landscaping – British Standards being the most obvious – these regulations do not allow for any practical solutions to marry sustainability to construction necessity.
There are ways to achieve this conundrum, which involve close client collusion and signed agreements including a specific style of Terms and Conditions (including methods statements and risk assessments modified for the purpose) written contract.
I hope that the Trade Associations can find a way to introduce a new form of pre-tender document suited to a raft of sustainable resolutions, which supersede legal requirements and drawn up by their respective Legal Advisers.
Creating the right tone of interview content to draw customers into the concept of working to sustainable methods and standards of sustainability is the challenge to the those who hold the key to bring about this essential transition.
