National Grid has a major gas mains replacement programme running over the next 10 years, involving replacement of over 100,000 km of old iron pipes with polyethylene ones. This will entail digging lots of holes, which will eventually mean filling lots of holes.

In 2005/6 National Grid set itself the following targets, and these are ongoing:

However National Grid are currently having difficulties with achieving these targets on recycled aggregates.  The Environment Council ran a one-day workshop in November 2006 for National Grid in their North West region. 

This workshop established the views of utilities companies, councils, contractors and suppliers in using recycled aggregate, what barriers there may be to using recycled and also looked at potential solutions. 

This workshop was highly successful and participants found enormous value in coming together to share perspectives, operational context and to jointly establish clear actions to address the issues identified. Given the impact of the first workshop, we continued to work with National Grid to hold a North London based workshop in March 2007, which was attended by over 60 stakeholders, and a Nottingham (for National Grid’s M1 Corridor region) workshop in February 2008.   We are currently working on designing and delivering a fourth in the series, which will be held in the West Midlands in Summer 2008. 

We have conducted our own evaluation of the events, incorporating the learnings as we went, and ensuring that each workshop was designed to specifically meet the needs of stakeholders in each region.