The NDA group | Employee Bulletin

The Mission and Me

Name: Imogen Campbell-Gray

Role/title: Environment and sustainability manager at RWM

How long have you been in post?

I followed a pretty unconventional route to where I am today. I studied a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management at university before moving into the waste management industry working for Veolia. I started working on their contracts supplying energy from waste and combined heat and power plants with household waste (refuse derived fuel.) I then moved onto SARP Industries VES Field Services, Veolia’s international chemical and hazard waste clean-up and remediation team, where I worked all around the world on the safeguarding, transport and disposal of obsolete pesticides, NORM, pharmaceuticals, PCBs, mercury wastes etc. During my time there I also decided to do a part-time Master’s Degree in Environmental Toxicology which is the foundation of most of my technical knowledge.

What does your job involve?

I’ve been at RWM for close to a year and a half now mostly focusing on creating our first sustainability policy and strategy along with a set of targets for up to 2025. There are 44 targets falling under 6 key themes: net zero by 2050; environmental enhancement and protection; health safety and wellbeing; education and employment; social impact: working with communities; inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Alongside that I work on improving our environmental performance whether that be reducing our resource use or ensuring we meet our waste management targets which includes a zero to landfill policy.

More recently I’ve been working with our technical team to understand more about what the future carbon footprint of a geological disposal facility (GDF) might be and how we bring that number down as low as we possibly can through planning, design and engineering of the facility. This work will feed into the Carbon Management Plan I’m developing over coming months.

I’ve baselined our business 2019/20 carbon footprint which is relatively small as we had limited travel and office occupancy during the pandemic and from now on, we’ll report our emissions annually to provide visibility to all on how that changes over time and as we change what we do as a business. Hopefully this and our progress against our sustainability targets will be fed into a dashboard that all RWM staff will be able to access and check in on.

Why is your role important to the mission?

The community-based consent process for a GDF, i.e a facility built to safely dispose of the UK’s higher activity radioactive waste, means that we’ll need a ‘social license to operate’ in the host community, and we’ll ensure our stakeholders are confident in the safe, secure and sustainable delivery of a GDF. There are also ever-evolving requirements from the regulators and a stringent legal backdrop against which a GDF will have to comply. Part of my role will be to help navigate through and ensure compliance with the complex international, national and nuclear-specific conditions we’ll need to meet.

I’m proud of what I do because….?

This is a project that can deliver on so many levels of ‘sustainability’. It’s an opportunity to show how modern large-scale infrastructure can be considerate of the environment and planet whilst still being functional, it can offer intergenerational growth and long-term economic stability to a region and ultimately a GDF is an environmental project in itself: delivering a long-term solution for high-level radioactive waste.