A new landscape: The rise of the environmental manager

Renting a flat? Changing your car? Booking a flight? Or just going to work? Whatever you do these days, you're likely, consciously or unconsciously, to have to grapple with environmental considerations.

And in each of these areas, there are professionals, armed with qualifications that were relatively rare until a decade or so ago, whose careers are substantially devoted to protecting the environment. Domestic energy assessors, hybrid car engineers, carbon footprint calculators, and meteorologists specialising in air flows would all have struggled to find employment until relatively recently. Now, they're part of 21st century life, and every workplace, regardless of what the firm produces, has to be managed with environmental considerations in mind.

"There are more and more people getting into the environment as a career and more and more companies realising they have to do more to demonstrate an environmental conscience," says Russell Foster, chief executive of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA), and a former environmental manager in the chemicals industry.

Recruitment companies report a steady rise in job openings in this area. Chris Kiernan, from the recruitment firm, Cobalt, identifies two factors behind what he calls a proliferation of such vacancies. "The continual development of environmental legislation, forcing companies to comply with increasingly stringent targets, and growing corporate awareness of the financial implications associated with environmental risk and their effect on the bottom line," he says.

So, an increasing number of organisations, including small- and medium-sized firms, now have an environmental manager or officer on their staff with overall responsibility for everything from energy efficiency, waste management and reducing packaging, to ensuring hazardous chemicals are used safely and disposed of in an ecologically sound way.

"We've come a lot further than paper recycling," says Foster.

The growth of professionals employed in predominantly environmental roles is illustrated in the IEMA's membership, which has risen from around 4,000, when the institute was founded in 1999, to 13,500 now.

And the jobs section of their website (iema.net) mirrors the wide range of positions where environmental credentials are required. Those featuring the phrases "sustainability", "climate change", "carbon" and "corporate social responsibility" have seen particularly marked growth in the last few years. And it's a rare employer these days without anyone responsible for dealing with outside organisations carrying out statutory duties on the environment front.

"I don't see as many raised eyebrows when people hear my job title now," says Louise Little, environmental protection officer for the London Borough of Havering, whose job involves assessing potential areas in the borough where the land might be contaminated from industrial or waste disposal use. "It's becoming more commonplace for businesses to have someone with the job of environmental monitoring officer or environmental manager who I will deal with."

Another part of her job is to give advice on planning applications, focusing on air and land quality and noise. To this end, she has to request information and statistics from land owners and businesses.

"The quality of reports about land quality and air pollution that I am getting has improved, both in the private and the public sector," she adds.

Large employers routinely now have whole teams working in environmental roles. Matthew Payne, environmental improvement manager for Rolls-Royce, based at their main aero-engine works in Derby, is just one of well over 100 Rolls-Royce employees whose full- or part-time job involves environmental or health and safety considerations. He's worked his way up through environmental roles of increasing seniority since joining the firm on completion of a Masters degree in environmental monitoring 11 years ago.

Among his numerous responsibilities are ensuring that oil is stored in conditions that avoid any leakage that could get into surface water, checking chimneys have the right filtration devices, and that staff know what to do if an alarm goes off, so pollution incidents can be avoided.

"Although I'm a generalist I do have to maintain a reasonable level of technical knowledge in most of the specialist areas. But, when we are building a new factory for example, we might get a specialist consultant in to do some air dispersion modelling," he explains.

Those specialists usually come from environmental consultancies, which have also been proliferating steadily over the last decade. One such organisation is Smith Grant LLP, based in Wrexham, where three partners and four consultants jointly offer services in three main areas: environmental auditing (helping businesses meet their legal requirements, and assessing the overall environmental "health" of firms), air quality assessment and management; and contaminated land investigation, risk assessment and treatment.

Katrina Hawkins, one of the partners, specialises principally in the land quality work, usually on sites where developments are planned. The most common factors are quality and behaviour of the surface and ground water, the presence of any ground gases (methane, carbon dioxide or natural gas), and testing for heavy metals present in the soil.

"The metals issue is particularly important in housing developments, because children play in gardens and can ingest the chemicals," she explains. "The most common way to deal with this is to put a clean cover over the ground, consisting of 300mm hardcore and 300mm clean top soil."

One sign of the growing awareness of land quality is the stage at which developers bring people with this expertise.

"People are a lot more advanced than 10 years ago," says Hawkins. "So usually we are brought in earlier in the process, looking at a site and giving a general summary of the issues developers may have to deal with."

This is a further sign of the elevation of environmental considerations up the list of priorities of businesses in most fields, and something that convinces Hawkins that career openings in this field will remain abundant.

"In the long term I think there will only be more opportunities," she says. "The prospects are very good, and there's also such a variety of places to work: local authorities, consultancies and private companies."

And Foster agrees, predicting continued growth in IEMA membership.

"I'm under no illusion that an institute like ours is just scratching the surface. And I'm sure that within a few years we have the potential to double our membership as more and more companies wake up to their responsibilities."

'The key is making it fun for employees'

David Mason, 33, is one of five environmental managers working for the UK division of Skanska, the international construction company. The entire UK environmental team numbers about 30. He has worked, for different employers, on the environmental side of building projects since finishing his Masters in environmental science at Southampton University in 2001.

"During my first degree I did a one-year placement at the Corus steelworks in Port Talbot and that's when I really got interested in this sort of work. Before I arrived there, I'd only done chemistry in a lab. But at Corus, I experienced dealing with problems and people on site, where, if you have a noise complaint or some pollution, you have to find a solution.

After my Masters, I worked as an environmental advisor for Mowlem (later bought by Carillion). One of the really interesting and challenging jobs I did then was on a road- and bridge-widening project on an MoD firing range in Northumbria National Park to accommodate the Army's bigger equipment. Since the land had been a restricted area, the local environment had become rich, so we had to protect it. So I was dealing with risks to badgers, adders, otters and bats spread out across a wide area.

Now, at Skanska, my role is about looking at the future as well as advising on current projects. For example, we are trying to predict which building products might be banned in the future, and trying to phase them out ourselves. An example of this is formaldehyde in wood glue. I'm also looking at the chain of custody of all the timber we use, so we can be absolutely sure it has all been sourced in a legal and sustainable way.

We're also doing a study on the carbon footprint of the building process itself, particularly regarding the energy embodied in all the materials we are using. We did this on a development we are doing in Paddington, and discovered that one building creates the same carbon footprint as all our staff travel over a year put together. That shows that travel is not the most important thing to concentrate on."

‘The key is making it fun for employees’

Victoria Wood, 26, is BSkyB's environment manager, based at their headquarters in West London. After doing a first degree in geography at Oxford University, she completed a Masters in environmental technology at Imperial College, London. Before joining BSkyB, she worked as an environmental consultant for the design and engineering consultancy, Scott Wilson.

"Essentially, my job's about looking to reduce Sky's environmental impact, which is a massive role: from reducing our carbon footprint, to bringing about behavioural change among Sky's 16,000 employees. That means inspiring people to take action making small changes that add up to having big effects. For example, changing their waste disposal habits, travel options and energy use.

We have removed desk bins across the whole of Sky, so that people now walk to a central point in their work space to throw things away. This has had a massive impact. Now we're looking to simplify things even further by reducing the choices people have when they get to these bins to just two: mixed recycling and landfill. We're also looking at how we simplify the labelling of these bins. The key, though, is making it fun for the employees and not presenting it in a negative way. We have a network of eco-ambassadors and eco-teams across Sky, who now have a six-month programme, in which they meet once a month and focus on a specific environmental issue.

My job involves desk work, meeting lots of teams across Sky and also travelling around our different locations, including Scotland.

I also visit Sky's waste management suppliers – either local authorities or private companies – to check that they are complying with their legal obligations, and doing things in a way that we would want them to. The fact that the CEO of Sky is fully behind all this is a sign of how far things have come and evidence of the momentum behind environmental issues.

I really like the job because it's so varied: I get involved with a wide range of people, at Sky and with our suppliers. It's rewarding because, although it sounds like a cliché, I wanted to feel that I am making a difference."