Quarry Managers are encouraged to contact the Green Quarry Concrete Fund as early as possible concerning their intention to initiate a certified Biodiversity Enhancement plan for their quarry. This can be done by using the contact box on this web site.
Certifications that support active ecological management and that are currently acknowledged by the GQCF as qualifying for reimbursement are:
If you are applying for another certification scheme please contact GQCF
to determine whether it is acknowledged by the Fund.
Once you have undertaken a certification or re certification of your biodiversity enhancement plan at your quarry you can apply for reimbursement of a proportion of the fees that you have paid out.
The proportion of the fees depends upon the state of the Green Quarry Concrete Fund and the proportion reimbursable will be advertised below for the coming quarter of the calendar year.
The proportion of qualifying fees reimbursed in Q1 2016 will be: x%
Applications for re imbursement of fees should be sent by email to:
and Must include the following:
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Contact name
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Contact telephone number
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Contact email address (if different)
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Organisation
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Quarry Location
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The bank sort code you wish the reimbursement paid into
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The bank account number you wish the reimbursement paid into
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The reference you wish applied to the transfer
and for each fee:
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The total amount of the qualifying fee
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The date of certification
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pdf (s) of the qualifying invoices
Note: should the scheme be dispersing public funds alternate rules will most probably apply.
The reimbursement will be calculated and a confirmation email sent back to the nominated contact. Whereupon, subject to funds being available, the transfer will be made within 10 working days.
Should quarry owners wish to have existing certified quarries identified on the GQCF web site they can submit supporting documentation with a suggested donation of £200 per quarry site to cover administration costs.
The Green Quarry Concrete Fund is exploring European Regional Development Funding / Treasury Funding to support the transition phase of the project which would, as stated above, have implications for the structure of the re-imbursement process.
Quarry owners are often doing their bit to manage the ecological impacts of their operations, particularly when it comes to post operation restoration. Active ecological enhancement would also support quarry owners with permissions, community engagement and supply chain audits. However, the vast majority of quarry managers cannot afford the expert advice they need nor the independent verification of their efforts during the active phase of their quarrying operations. The Green Quarry Concrete Fund aims to support the transition to verifiable ecologicial enhancement of all UK RMX aggregate supplying quarries, whether large integrated businesses or smaller independents, through the proportional re-imbursement of Quarry owner expenses. This would create a next chapter in the industry's ecological story.
Value to Quarry owners
Quarrying is at the top of a competitive construction industry supply chain. For quarry owners managing and mitigating the Biodiversity impacts of quarrying activity is an aid to extraction licencing and helps with local community engagement. Construction industry Clients are also becoming increasingly interested in the environmental impacts of their supply chains. New revisions to ISO 14000 will also drive matters in this direction.
Many Quarry Owners would like to extend their environmental management systems to cover ecological enhancements and have these activities externally verified to the satisfaction of third parties. However, they simply lack the available funds to do so, on an ongoing basis. Existing EIA regulations associated with quarry operations are becoming weaker as planning authority ecological competence is weakening in response to public funding cuts.
With the suspension of the Sustainability Fund of the Aggregate Levy in 2012 another route to supplementary funding of quarry level sustainability activity disappeared.
The Green Quarry Concrete Fund has been set up to enable all the quarries in the UK that supply aggregate for Ready Mix Concrete to independently verify that they are actively enhancing their ecological impacts. Using the Fair Trade model to bypass the competitive market processes that operate within the industry, the fund seeks contributions from all the largest ( >1500m3 RMX) developments/infrastructure projects in the UK. Quarry owner expenses are reimbursed in proportion to the size of the fund, or if in relation to public funds according to state aid rules. All supported quarries are publically acknowledged by the Green Quarry Concrete Fund.
The objective of the Green Quarry Concrete Fund is to enable a rapid whole industry transition to independent verification of the competent management and monitoring of the ecological enhancement of all UK quarries, in the most cost effective way possible. With a view to reaching a point where it the majority of UK quarries are certified by 2018 so that certification then becomes part of the de facto specification of RMX without significant impact on logistical costs, carbon nor competition.
Example wording for use within contractor specification from 2018 might be:
"Where virgin aggregate from UK land based quarries is used within the production of Ready Mix Concrete it is only obtained from quarries that have active, externally certified, biodiversity enhancement plans in operation. (Active certificates may also be lodged with a nominated 3rd party e.g. the Green Quarry Concrete Fund)"
Re-imbursement process
Benefits to Quarry Owners
