The Highways Term Maintenance Association (HTMA) has produced an environmental training DVD in an effort to support member organisations and their clients with environmental awareness and management.
The DVD, which is entitled ‘Sustainable Highway Maintenance’, is also available for general use within the highways maintenance and management industry.
Chris Plant, group HSE advisor for Ringway who led this project for HTMA, said: ‘’The aim of this project is to support the upskilling of personnel at all levels in the highways maintenance industry in basic environmental management principles, and to increase their awareness and understanding of the potential impact of their work. HTMA member companies can also use it to inform their sub-contractors and improve the overall environmental knowledge within the highways industry.
‘’Term maintenance contractors have a responsibility to comply with environmental legislation and improve their sustainability performance. To achieve this, environmental awareness and engagement of all employees is required. Training forms a major part of this process. It also provides a number of additional benefits such as: reducing the risk of prosecution and reputational impact and avoiding environmental fines and clean-up costs.”
To avoid overload of information for operational staff from the wide range of processes and procedures, the DVD has been developed to provide short, bite-size training modules so that recipients will have a greater understanding of the basic legal requirements that they should follow on site. The modules can be used in toolbox talks, team briefings or be integrated into broader training programmes; eight topics are covered: Pollution Prevention, Biodiversity , Energy, Material Usage, Water, Waste Management, Nuisance and Emergency Response.
The DVD was jointly funded by the CITB and HTMA, with members of the HTMA developing the content to achieve key sustainability objectives.
The DVD is available to view via the HTMA website, www.htma.info. Hard copies of the DVD can be purchased at a nominal price by contacting the secretariat.