How did CEEQUAL develop?

CEEQUAL was developed by a team led by the ICE, with government financial support from the DETR (now Defra) and DTI Partners in Innovation (PII) schemes, and from the ICE's Research & Development Enabling Fund.

The development of CEEQUAL was managed by Crane Environmental Ltd, and received active support and participation of relevant government departments and agencies, professional and industry associations, and leading civil engineering consultants and contractors. The organisations contributing resources to the project were Project Partners, many of whom now own shares in CEEQUAL Ltd, the company set up to run the Scheme.

Following extensive industry-wide consultation and trialling, the scheme was launched in September 2003 and the first eight Awards presented at the ICE.

Since then, CEEQUAL has become the accepted UK industry scheme for assessing environmental and sustainability performance in civil engineering and public realm projects, and is now widely used by major civil engineering clients, designers and contractors. The total construction value of all projects assessed or in process of being assessed under CEEQUAL reached the £12 billion mark in autumn 2009, and uptake is increasing steadily.

A substantially revised and updated version of the CEEQUAL Manual – Version 4 of the CEEQUAL Manual for Projects – was launched in November 2008. A new ‘Term-Contracts’ version of the Manual relating to maintenance projects is currently being developed and is due to be launched in 2010.

 

What are CEEQUAL's objectives in relation to other environmental tools?

The objective in setting up CEEQUAL was to encourage the attainment of environmental excellence in civil engineering projects and thereby to deliver improved environmental and sustainability performance in project specification, design and construction.

In the development of CEEQUAL, account was taken of the substantial body of research and experience relating to environmental issues on construction projects, environmental management of design and construction, and the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) – an award scheme that has achieved a voluntary improvement in the environmental specification, construction and performance of buildings.

However, unlike the BREEAM scheme for buildings, where there are specific schemes for different types of building, CEEQUAL is an assessment framework appropriate to any civil engineering or public realm project, such as roads and railways, airports, coast and river works, water supply and wastewater treatment, power stations, retail and business parks. The differences between the different types of civil engineering projects are taken account of in the scoping-out process carried out at the beginning of each assessment.

CEEQUAL includes environmental aspects such as the use of water, energy and land, ecology, landscape, noise and dust, archaeology, waste minimisation and management, and community amenity. Awards are made to projects in which the clients, designers and constructors have gone beyond the legal and environmental minima, to achieve distinctive environmental standards of performance.

CEEQUAL is a scheme operated by and for the UK construction industry. However, discussions are in progress for country-specific versions of CEEQUAL to be developed in the future.