This is the question addressed by Eastwood's Chartered Environmentalist, Catherine Topliss in her guest blog for the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) for World Environmental Day.

Blog extract: Introducing the three Rs

Most people will have come across discussion of the importance of the three Rs in education: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. The foundation blocks of learning.

As a sustainability professional, however, the three Rs have taken on a different meaning: reduce, reuse, recycle.

And they’re implicitly taken to be an integral consideration for all projects.

Consequently, the recent news article of plastic crisp and sweet packets from the 1960s being found on a Norfolk beach, not surprisingly, caught my eye.

My thoughts went to the knowledge that our reliance on plastic has increased substantially since the 1960s, alongside our reliance on landfills.

(I’ll just note that I wasn’t born in the 1960s but have dug trial pits through many a landfill of varying age, when undertaking ground investigations, several decades later!)

This led me to reflect on how far we’ve come on the sustainability journey since I joined the engineering profession, and a few years later became a Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv) when the qualification was introduced in the mid 2000s.

Continue to read the full blog here