Partner: WSP
In July 2021 National Highways announced a plan which set a target of reducing all emissions emitted on the National Highways run Strategic Road Network to Net Zero by 2050. The plan, which is called The Net Zero Highways 2030/2040/2050 plan, sets out three main targets focused on three different areas of emissions. First is net zero corporate emissions by 2030, the second is net zero emissions on all road construction and maintenance by 2040 and third is net zero emissions from all road users by 2040.
National Highways is responsible for running 2% of the UK’s roads. While this doesn’t sound like much, those roads have one third of all car miles travelled and two thirds of all HGV miles travelled. This makes National Highways one of the largest stakeholders in the entire UK transport sector.
Reducing the amount of CO2 emitted by the transport sector is crucially important. The UKs energy sector has been steadily decarbonising since the 1990s with the use of less coal and more renewable resources. This means that the transport sector is now the UKs largest emitter of greenhouse gases and in 2019 was responsible for 27% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions.
Before National Highways wrote their net zero plan, they bought in WSP to consult, David Symons WSPs Sustainability Director says “We have been working with National Highways now for around about two years, on their net zero plan from an initial concept through to developing the plan itself and refining that with the leadership team. And now we’re working with the company to support the practical implementation of that plan.”
The Plan for Net Zero
The first part in National Highways plan to reduce corporate emission to net zero will look similar to many other organisations plans for net zero. To reduce their corporate emissions to net zero, National Highways will reduce paper waste, implement more flexible ways of working and reduce the size of their office space.
However, there are more complicated aspects of reducing National Highways corporate emissions. National Highways is one of the UK’s largest asset owners and are responsible for the lighting of all their roads. In the plan they have committed to changing all light bulbs to LED and buying all their electricity from renewable energy resources, as well as changing all their traffic officer vehicle fleet to electric vehicles.
To offset any remaining corporate emissions National Highways plans to plant three million trees along the strategic road network.
The second part of the plan is to reduce all construction and maintenance emissions to zero by 2040. Steve Elderkin, the Director of Sustainability for National Highways, the man in charge of implementing the net zero plan, believes that this part of the plan will be the most difficult for National Highways to achieve.
“The biggest, call it opportunity, call it challenge that I see in this plan is probably delivering zero carbon maintenance and construction across the motorway and a road network in the UK by 2040. And this, although it’s the middle target, it’s the one that I think is the most challenging for us.”
This is due to the fact that achieving net zero maintenance and construction emissions will require a lot of buy-in from across the construction industry. Materials like cement, asphalt and steel all emit CO2 during the production process. Innovation in the construction industry to find new materials and processes to reduce carbon emissions is not in the hands of National Highways alone.
However, National Highways is well positioned, as one of the construction industries largest asset owners, to influence contractors throughout the industry to get on board with their plan and start making strides towards net zero themselves.
Steve Elderkin says he already sees signs of the industry moving to align with the National Highways plan. “We had one supplier whose target was 2045. And they’ve since aligned with us and said no, now we’ll aim to get there for 2040.” National Highways will be publishing a route map highlighting plans of how to decarbonise the key construction materials used by the road construction industry by the end of 2022.
The third and final element of the plan is to reduce all on road vehicle emissions to net zero by 2050. This means all cars and HGVs on the roads are going to have to move over from diesel and fuel to electric.
This is the most important element of the plan as 98% of National Highways emissions come from road users, only around 2% from construction and maintenance and 0.1% from their corporate emissions. Construction work results in 734,000 tonnes of CO2 a year but road users emit nearly 33 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
The UK Government has already announced plans to end the sale of diesel and petrol cars by 2030 and for all new cars to emit zero tailpipe emissions by 2035. And Steve Elderkin points out there has already been strong progress towards more electric vehicles, “I think last month, more electric vehicles were sold than in the whole of 2019. I think that there’s a lot of positive momentum there.”
However, there is still a lot of work National Highways needs to do to be ready for the electric vehicle revolution. Currently electric vehicle users face a slow and unreliable recharging process on the strategic road network, although 95% of the strategic road network is within 20 minutes of a charger these can often be slow or even not working.
The Government has pledged £950 million towards improving the UK electric charging infrastructure and Steve Elderkin explains what that money will be invested on “So at the moment focus is on fast chargers, they really take quite a draw. So you know, over 100 kilowatts, you can’t have that many of those without a fairly sizable connection to the national grid. And so to get the kind of banks of charges that you would like at motorway service areas, those connections need to be upgraded.”
Despite plans in place and strong government support, cars are not the only polluters on the road, another major polluter is HGVs. Currently the technology for carbon neutral HGVs doesn’t exist. Future carbon neutral HGVs could use a hydrogen fuel cell, a large battery or even some form of external electrical connection like tram lines use.
National Highways will present a report to the government in 2022 outlining the current trials taking place around the world for carbon neutral HGVs and recommend which solution should receive funding for UK trials. Then in 2028 National Highways will release an investment plan highlighting their preferred method for zero emission HGVs so they can meet the Department for Transports goal of phasing out non-zero emissions trucks by 2040.
Future Ready
A large part of the National Highways net zero plan requires making plans now for an uncertain future. WSP runs a programme called ‘Future Ready’ which David Symons is a leader of. David Symons says planning with Future Ready means taking potential future trends into account during the planning and design stage.
“Typically the design life we are asked to design for is 120 years. So if we just designed to code, we know that we will get designs and buildings that have some consideration of the future, but absolutely will not cover all of the trends that we will expect. And so that was exactly the same for the net zero plan, as well. So as part of the modelling, as part of our forward look to the plan.” Says David Symons.
WSPs Future Ready approach has already been used on other design projects they have been involved with. A series of modular bridges were installed on HS2 where materials were manufactured off site and then craned in and assembled.
Planning for future infrastructure along the strategic road network will need to take into account the shift to electric vehicles and whatever the future holds for HGVs as well as other technological innovations that National Highways could implement.
Digital Roads
One future innovation that Steve Elderkin thinks could make a significant difference in National Highways carbon emissions is called Digital Roads. Digital Roads is a term that encompasses a variety of digital technologies that could be used to reduce the carbon of road users and road construction.
One important element will be digital twins, allowing for projects to be constructed and rehearsed in a digital format first, allowing an opportunity to identify areas of waste and make sure the physical construction process will be right first time.
Another example of applying digital roads that could be used further into the future is taking advantage of autonomous connected vehicles, Steve Elderkin explains trials have already started. “We’ve recently been trialling platooning of lorries through connected and autonomous vehicles. Further work is required, but potentially platooning or autonomous connected vehicles could move closer together. And that would allow you to get more journeys on a given amount of road surface. If we can do that, then that reduces the amount of new construction and additional lane capacity that we need to build.”
Implementing the Plan
The difficulty in reaching net zero emissions is not the writing of a plan outlining your goals rather it’s the implementing of that plan. WSP were subsequently brought in to assist with the implementation of the plan after it was written.
Much of the plan requires long term planning and collaboration with others in the road construction industry, but there are other parts of the plan that National Highways have already got well underway.
David Symons points out elements of the plan that are already underway “The programme to start retrofitting the LEDs that you know, across the network. I mean, it sounds maybe it’s maybe it sounds simple, but I mean, actually, it’s still a pretty big programme. I think also, realistically, probably also the programme to gradually move all of the traffic officer fleet over to electric vehicles.” Along with this the plan to plant 3 million trees on National Highways land has already started, but so have some of the more long-term goals.
Changing materials used in the construction industry may take longer but steps like writing detailed route maps and engaging with the suppliers across the industry have already begun. In fact Stee Elderkin has already seen improvements made by 3rd party contractors that have helped National Highways reduce their own emissions, ‘In terms of carbon efficiency, you’re reducing carbon emissions, through quality and through, right first time and avoiding waste. An example, recently, where partners in the supply chain identified a detail in one of our standards, it specified a particular kind of concrete mix. If we could permit them to use a different kind of concrete mix that achieved the same design standard, it would allow them to reduce the cement by a third. And that’s without any change to the user experience.”
WSPs Carbon Commitment
Beyond their work with National Highways, WSP have made their own internal commitment towards their carbon emissions.
David Symons explains, “So the commitment that we’ve made to half the carbon of our advice, and our design says that there is us and there is one other who has made that commitment in our sector so we are really proud of that and what that means is this covers the carbon that we are responsible for on the projects that we are commissioned for.”
As part of that effort WSP are backing big innovation programmes and are testing 150 different low carbon materials to look into their viability for construction. They have made it a core part of their missions and encourage employees to be at the heart of their efforts to reduce their carbon emissions.
David Symons also says that WSP are willing to turn down work from clients if they don’t believe they are taking the issues of reducing carbon emissions seriously enough. “At the moment, we will absolutely turn down work where we have clients who say, You know what, we’re not that serious about it, we’re wanting to pay lip service. But you know what, the whole economy has to decarbonize.”
Lessons Learned
Throughout the process of writing and now beginning to implement National Highways net zero plan, both Steve Elderkin and David Symons have learned a few important lessons about the process and what it takes to be effective.
Steve Elderkin says “I think one thing that worked incredibly well at National Highways is we had some really passionate and committed people at exec level. That sort of championing of the importance of this agenda, that visible leadership helped to create an environment where it was possible to make the ambitious commitments and develop the plan and make the commitments to the actions that we’ve talked about.”
David Symons says that the first step is to set bold targets, being ambitious and clearly setting the goal drives action. More important though is implementation, “have as much focus on how you will implement the plan as on what are your targets within the plan? Because what is really important, but how do you actually implement it on day two, and keep the focus and keep the momentum up is as important as what you are saying you are going to do?”
Organisation and large corporations must start getting serious about net zero. Being bold and taking action now is vital for the entire UK economy if we are to reach the carbon emissions goals laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement.
David Symons is clear that without change from major companies with the transport industry the UK achieving net zero is not possible, “There is no merit whatsoever in just, you know, writing off whole sections of the economy minute because we love to hate them. The reality is, if you think about roads, if you think about aviation, if you think about how we all get around, there is no net zero without Net Zero roads without Net Zero aviation. And that is the reality. So let’s get on the bus and work with clients who are really serious about it. And together, we will deliver that net zero economy.”
