Essex Grab Hire Ltd – Going for Gold

Established in 1999 Essex Grab Hire gives you a simple one stop solution to your building and demolition needs. We offer reliable waste removal and on time deliveries of sand, aggregates, gravel and ballast. You will find our prices are very competitive and our service excellent. We have many hundreds of satisfied customers. Based in Epping, Essex Grab Hire is a responsible, professional, well established family run company with nearly two decades of experience in the Waste Management Industry. At your service is a modern fleet of 8 wheel grab lorries providing a first class grab hire service in Essex, Hertfordshire and London. Donna Cook, Director, explains how Essex Grab Hire Ltd have achieved huge reductions in fuel use through FORS.

We came across FORS when tendering for work across London. When we looked at the requirements and benefits of joining the scheme we saw that they fitted in perfectly with our ethos of improving safety whilst complementing our drive to improve fuel efficiency and reduce our environmental impact’

We take compliance and safety very seriously so we achieved our Bronze and Silver Accreditation first time. FORS did help us by providing training and tools that improved the policies and procedures.

The performance management toolkit really helped us set our targets for reducing our carbon footprint and Penalty charge notices while improving our MPG. FORS has helped us improve our filing systems and procedures.

“FORS has helped us achieve compliance and safety.” – Donna Cook Director.

Our Drivers have completed the Safe Urban Driving Course and FORS E-Learning Modules. We have also invested a lot into safety equipment for our lorries.

“We have improved our MPG in the past 12 months saving us money and Co2.” – Donna Cook Director.

We have increased our MPG by 15.29% over the past 12 months compared to our baseline year, we achieved this by making sure our driver selects the best possible route to our sites and reduced our Idling across the Fleet.

*Annual improvement in MPG

• We get all my drivers to complete a comprehensive Medical Declaration on a annually basis even though the FORS Standard states once every 5 years. It’s also mentioned in the drivers handbook that if they at any point in time start suffering from a medical condition they need to notify the company ASAP as well as if they need to start taking medication prescribed by their GP or over the counter drugs. We will then investigate it to see if it’s still safe for the driver to be driving for the company and we may even ask the driver to get a letter from his doctor informing the company if he is still able to drive for the company. We will then start doing more driver assessments on the driver to make sure he isn’t a risk to the company or anyone on the road.
• We have recently adopted a recruitment policy to try and help us recruit young drivers into the Transport industry.
• We only use the Operating centre for parking our lorries. We don’t do any loading/ unloading on site and all our servicing is done by main dealers at their sites not ours. The only noise generated is when my lorries are idling so we can carry out our defect checks. All my lorries have white noise reversing alarms fitted to them.
• We run a fleet of 32 tonne tippers. We have looked at alternative fuels and alternative transport but after looking at the whole life cost of each vehicle, it isn’t cost effective for us to run Electric vehicles or using alternative methods of transport as trains etc. There isn’t any electric vehicle for our size tipper lorries (32 tonne) we already use adblue in them to help reduce our carbon footprint and improve our MPG. We have increased our MPG from an average of 5.94 MPG across the whole fleet to 6.86 MPG in the past 12 months (which is a 15.29% improvement). So even though we don’t have any electric vehicles we are reducing our Co2, Nox and PM’s by actively managing our anti idling and route planning.

We will continue using what FORS has taught us to improve our MPG and reduce any wasted idling we might have and keep our Parking fines and Charges to zero.

Gaining FORS Gold Accreditation shows how dedicated we are as a company to improving road safety and the safety of all vulnerable road users in London as well as nationally. We will continuously use what FORS has taught us to help reduce our carbon footprint and make the roads so safer for everyone that uses them. We have also managed to make a significant saving by reducing our fuel usage and improving our MPG.