Executive interview: Frank Price of Grontmij

How the Dutch group is intent on building UK market share in spite of the downturn in remediation work, and the benefits of getting its own corporate responsibility practices in order

Grontmij’s UK and Ireland operations director talks with Erin Gill

A year or two ago the origins of the name Grontmij may have been a subtle source of help in winning the company new business in the UK. Grontmij, which has a history dating back to 1915 in the Netherlands, combines elements of the Dutch words for ‘soil improvement’ and ‘reclamation company’ - and while the UK development sector was booming, Grontmij’s very name reinforced its expertise in the areas of site investigation, remediation and other land-related services.

In the last audited financial year (2007), as much as 35% of its £8.2 million environmental business in the UK came from contaminated land remediation work. But times have changed and Grontmij’s UK and Ireland operations director Frank Price admits that the recent severe slowdown in the development market has had an impact. “We’ve certainly seen a downturn in the developer-led land remediation business. There are no two ways about it”. Despite this, Mr Price says that Grontmij has not made any redundancies and that if it wins some of the major water-related contracts it is currently bidding for, the company will be actively recruiting.

Staff numbers in the UK environmental group have already been boosted to over 330 this year, following two recent acquisitions – Whitelaw Turkington (landscape architects) and Roger Preston & Partners (sustainable building services engineers).

When it comes to the downturn in land remediation work, it is not only housebuilders who have put projects on hold, but other major landowners with extensive, long-term site remediation and development programmes. Such clients have “simply turned the tap off,” according to Frank Price. “They’ve been saying to themselves ‘why should we spend our remediation budget this year to clean up sites that we won’t be able to sell? We’ll remediate them at some point in the future, when the finances make sense again’.”

Still, there remain a few silver linings tucked away within the dark clouds of the UK property development sector. Grontmij does a good deal of work in Scotland, where site development has not ground to a halt. “In Scotland, we have seen virtually no impact at all. We also have a strong waste business there,” says Mr Price. In addition, Grontmij is benefiting from work for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, to be held in Glasgow. “The Commonwealth Games are big and they are spawning a lot of work in the Glasgow area and we’re taking a pleasing amount of it.”

Grontmij’s involvement with the Scottish National Indoor Sports Arena is an example and Mr Price is keen to point out how successful Grontmij has been in reducing the arena’s development costs. “We saved the client something in the region of £8 million. A feasibility study had assumed a particular strategy for remediating the site, but we remodelled the site engineering and found there was no need to remove as much material to landfill,” he explains. Clearly, Grontmij’s senior managers hope that its staff’s knowledge of quantitative risk assessment and their ability to “take the regulators with us” will guarantee that even during recession the company will win a considerable proportion of whatever site-based work is available.

Saving clients cash

Coming up with ways to save clients money is a tactic that many a savvy environmental consultancy will focus on as the recession deepens, so it comes as no surprise that Grontmij is proud of its newly patented ‘Sharon’ process, which significantly reduces the cost of removing nitrate pollution from wastewater. “It’s a low energy means of completing the final stripping and polishing of nitrates from wastewater liquors,” enthuses Mr Price. “It has a very advantageous carbon footprint and it’s cheap – about a quarter of the price of alternative technologies.” With the Sharon technology already employed in the Netherlands, and soon to be in use in New York and at Anglian Water’s Whitlingham sewage treatment works, Grontmij hopes to interest other UK water companies in it.

The introduction of this product to the UK is an example of what Mr Price expects to see more of: skills and techniques from one part of Grontmij being deployed in another part of the world. Breaking down the barriers between Grontmij’s nation-based businesses is a group priority. This could mean that Grontmij’s Danish wind energy experts will work on any offshore wind work won by the UK business. Likewise, Grontmij’s Dutch staff, who have been instrumental in ensuring full implementation by the Netherlands of the EU water framework directive, may be able to use that experience to assist UK clients as they face the challenge of WFD implementation, says Mr Price.

Another issue at the forefront of Frank Price’s mind is sustainability, both the prospect of winning sustainability-related work and the importance of formalising Grontmij’s own commitment to corporate responsibility. In addition to his role as operations director for Grontmij UK and Ireland, Mr Price has also recently been appointed to manage internal CSR and sustainability. “This year, Grontmij will produce a corporate responsibility report in line with the standards set out by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). We’ll probably be the first environmental consultancy operating in the UK to do so,” says Mr Price proudly. “We’ve been reducing our carbon footprint for years, but not in a concerted, managed way. Now, we’re systemising our efforts.”

Mr Price believes the time has come for consultancies to practice what they preach in terms of sustainability. “Building sustainability into Grontmij is very rewarding, and taking that experience out to clients is also good for us from a commercial perspective.” Not only does such an approach improve a consultancy’s credibility in the eyes of potential clients, increasingly it may determine whether a consultancy meets the basic contractual requirements set out by some of the larger client organisations. “Anglian Water made it clear at its carbon summit earlier this year that if suppliers aren’t helping the company meet its internal carbon challenge there will be no further work from Anglian,” Frank Price explains.

Just as well, then, that Grontmij is developing a web-based carbon management tool for Anglian that will allow the water company’s asset management designers to calculate the carbon implications of their decision-making: “Anglian staff will be able to use a drag and drop approach to building a carbon model for an entire asset design programme. The tool we’re developing won’t simply cover the embedded carbon of, say, variable speed pump XYZ from manufacturer B. It will also allow us to input information about the operational carbon emissions associated with that pump.”

The potential for carbon management tools of this sort to have far-reaching impacts on a client’s key business decisions clearly thrills Mr Price: “What is fascinating is that carbon management is beginning to influence programme managers. The design of area-wide assessment management programmes and their phasing will be led increasingly by the carbon agenda.”

From science to sustainability

As the owner of an electric-hybrid Toyota Prius, Frank Price’s enthusiasm for so-called ‘soft’ issues, such as sustainability, reflect a longstanding personal interest and considerable professional experience. Yet at the outset, his career was a thoroughly scientific one. With a PhD in mineralogy, Mr Price began his career at Robertson’s, the north Wales-based mineral, petroleum and resource consultancy.

Working in Robertson’s analytical laboratory and providing a mineralogical service to the oil exploration industry, in his “spare time” he was involved in contaminated land investigation. “This is back in the early 1980s. I was going around to engineering consultants and saying ‘I want to do your contaminated soil analysis’ and they were saying ‘we don’t do any contaminated land work’. If only I’d known then how contaminated land sector would develop, I would be a rich man today,” says Mr Price with a smile.

With time, asbestos-related work developed into an important aspect of his job. “I became an environmental chemist/mineralogist, if you like,” he says. Following Robertson’s highly-successful public flotation, the company bought a number of consultancies, which Mr Price helped to bring together in order to form a single technical consultancy, called Robertson’s Environmental. A series of sales, acquisitions and name changes later, what was Robertson’s Environmental is now the highly-regarded consultancy Entec. However, Frank Price moved on long before Entec was given its current name, having decided to see what the world was like from the other side of the fence.

“A lot of people were moving from local authorities into consultancy, and I thought I would buck the trend and go the other way. I joined Sheffield City Council and ran its environmental protection department,” explains Mr Price. “This was in the 1990s and Sheffield was a very forward looking authority. During my time there we were preparing for and implementing all sorts of new legislation: integrated pollution, prevention and control (IPPC), local air quality management, the Part IIA contaminated land regime, plus there was the Local Agenda 21 and Healthy Cities work. I sat on a lot of committees that worked with DEFRA and the European Commission to set out the details of various regulations.”

After ten years at the council, Mr Price joined Atkins, working overseas, particularly in Eastern Europe and India on sustainability issues, with projects for the UK Department for International Development (DfID), the World Bank and the United Nations, as well as on more technical projects related to air quality. “I helped Lithuania and Slovakia prepare their air quality strategies for accession into the EU,” says Mr Price, adding that convincing Lithuanian officials to update their air quality legislation was a challenge.

“Lithuania had come out of Russia very brutally and almost immediately became part of the EU. They felt they had good air quality standards, thank you very much. I had to explain that they had to change them to meet EU requirements and that this was non-negotiable. It was tough work, but interesting,” he adds.

European ownership offers stability

Back in the UK, Mr Price worked for Atkins for several more years, charged with leading its air and noise consultancy operations, until the offer to head up Grontmij UK and Ireland operations came his way four years ago. Despite the difficulties posed by economic recession, Mr Price is confident that Grontmij’s future is bright, not least because the group’s chief executive Sylvo Thijsen is so determined to expand, with the UK and Ireland top of the regions targeted for future growth.

Despite contributing only 11% of Grontmij’s total 2007 revenue, the UK and Irish business has been Grontmij’s most profitable and fastest growing area in recent years. And with Grontmij ranked in the mid-20s in industry league tables published by trade journals such as NCE and ENDS, senior figures within the group view the UK business as well placed to capture greater market share once this period of economic turmoil is over and to reflect the position it claims in the wider European market as "the fifth largest engineering and environmental consultancy".

“Foreign ownership gives us mammoth protection at a time like this,” says Mr Price. “Every part of the group supports the rest and we operate in countries where this recession is not being so widely felt, if at all. When the economic situation improves here, the emphasis will be on growth, including through acquisition, so we feel confident.”

• Grontmij’s latest financials, Environment Analyst 28-Nov-08