It’s Environment, Social and Governance Week at the Joseph Ash Group

Following World Environment Day at the weekend, the Joseph Ash Group has designated the first week of June to be ‘ESG Week’. During this week, we’re raising awareness of the environment and social and governance issues affecting our colleagues, clients, and suppliers.

This is the first year for our new annual event, and so far this week, we’ve delivered presentations on ‘What is ESG?’. We’ve also provided resources (posters and links to activities) to team members to help them understand some of the terminology used (e.g. ‘Carbon Neutral’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘Carbon Offsetting’). Plus, we’ve shared advice on being more energy, waste and water conscious both at work and at home.

Later this week, we’ll be conducting safety tours to reinforce the importance of health and safety in the workplace.

Here are some of the important topics we’re covering:

Environment

• Compliance with all environmental legislation

• Minimise all negative environmental impacts from our operations – emissions to air, water and land

• Minimise our resource usage and support a circular economy

• Reduce our carbon emissions and work towards achieving Net Zero carbon emissions.

Social

• Managing the risks to the health, safety & wellbeing of our colleagues and other stakeholders

• Improve the talent and diversity of our colleagues and create a value-based culture within the business

• Positively engage with our local community by providing support to local initiatives and charities

• Supporting apprenticeships.

Governance

• Effectively identifying, mitigating, and controlling business risk

• Operating in compliance with all applicable legislation

• Ethically conducting business and working with integrity

• Using reputable suppliers and working with customers that support our values

• Ensuring all decision-making is carried out with our values, strategy and impacts considered.

If you want to know more about ESG across the Joseph Ash Group (Joseph Ash Galvanizing and Premier Galvanizing), please get in touch. We’d love to tell you all about it!

When using steel in construction, hot dip galvanizing is an essential part of the project to protect the longevity of the metal. You carefully design your steel to fit the overall build of the construction project. But sufficient care and attention are also required when you design your steel for galvanization. If you design right for galvanizing you’ll prevent any processing problems at the galvanizing plant and will also ensure you get the best steel coating possible.

Here’s some key design pointers to enable your steelwork to be processed safely whilst giving you the best quality coating.

When sending steel to a galvanizing plant, you will have several goals in mind:

1. Fast turnaround
2. Premium quality coating
3. Excellent service
4. Good value for money.

Ensuring steelwork is suitably designed for hot dip galvanizing helps achieve these goals and ensures the steel is safe to be galvanized. Poor design can result in poor coating quality, additional costs, low production rates, and failure to meet delivery dates. Poor design can also pose serious health and safety risks for the people carrying out the galvanizing.

What does good design look like?

The importance of venting and drainage

When steel is immersed in the galvanizing bath, add vent and drain holes to sealed hollow sections or cavities to ensure superheated air can escape all internal spaces and the molten zinc can flow freely over all surfaces, external and internal. Failure to adequately vent would result in trapped air causing an explosion and endangering galvanizing workers. It would also cause zinc build-up where the excess zinc cannot drain properly.

The sizing and location of vent holes are just as important as the provision of these holes. As a guide, make the venting holes as large as the steelwork can manage (but talk to your galvanizer for the best advice for your fabrications). The hole locations will be determined by how the steelwork is hung on the jigs at the galvanizing plant.

When adequately sized and correctly located, vent and drainage holes will:

• Significantly reduce the risk of injury to galvanizers.
• Allow faster immersion and withdrawal speeds which will help to minimise excessive coating build-up and reduce the risk of distortion by minimising temperature differentials.
• Virtually eliminate the risk of damage to product, plant and equipment caused by the explosive vaporisation of entrapped moisture or air.
• Improve the characteristics of the galvanized coating by restricting the effects of zinc solidification during drainage and reducing the mass of zinc required to achieve a good finish.

Size, weight, and shape matter

To ensure a good hot dip galvanizing finish, size, weight, and shape really do matter. A fabrication design should ideally incorporate easily handled components or fabrications which can be single dipped or subsequently assembled by bolting with galvanized fastenings. Double dipping is a possible alternative. Seek advice from your galvanizer before proceeding.

Suspension holes or lifting lugs may be needed if there are no suitable points for locating hooks or wires. Once again, lifting points should be positioned to maximise venting and drainage.

Minimising distortion

You will not want your steelwork to become distorted during the galvanizing process. To minimise distortion, fabrications should ideally be symmetrical, suitable for single dipping, and incorporate sections of as near equal thickness as possible at the joints. Components should also fit perfectly to avoid force or restraint during joining. Use continuously welded joints with balanced welding techniques to reduce uneven thermal stresses and the largest possible radii on all curved members.

Choose your galvanizer wisely

As well as following the rules of good design for pre-galvanized steel, take care when choosing your galvanizer.

Health and safety standards

Look for a plant with exemplary health and safety standards. One where the plant managers work hard to keep all colleagues and visitors safe with up-to-date equipment, sufficient PPE, good air quality, and clear-to-follow rigorous shop floor processes. And one where team members work safely on every job by thoroughly inspecting steel from the point it is delivered and at key intervals of the galvanizing process to ensure projects will not pose health and safety risks.

Training

Look for a galvanizer that not only trains team members on all aspects of safety in galvanizing, but also teaches clients and the wider industry. At Joseph Ash Galvanizing for example, we issue ‘Safe Design for Hot Dip Galvanizing’ posters to our clients as reference guides for steel preparation. We’ve also published a ‘Design for Galvanizing’ video (available on our website and YouTube), and we run ‘Design for Galvanizing’ seminars onsite for client teams.

Technical help

A final piece of advice is to always look for a galvanizing company happy to be on hand to provide technical advice on all aspects of pre-galvanized steel preparation.

Joseph Ash Galvanizing has a Technical Support Team who will answer any steel fabrication questions from clients. The team members are also happy to visit fabrication shops and advise on venting requirements to ensure fabrication issues can be resolved before the steel reaches the galvanizing plant.

We hope you’ve found these pointers helpful. For more information, please get in touch with a member of our team. There is also lots of helpful information freely provided by the Galvanizers Association.

As sustainability and good emission management are critical drivers for Joseph Ash Galvanizing, we always try to look for suppliers with like-minded responsible approaches to the environment.

Kall Kwik Birmingham is one of our suppliers, and we were proud to welcome them into our vendor family three years ago, as their green initiatives are admirable.

In 2019 Kall Kwik Birmingham joined Carbon Capture®, a unique market-leading, high impact, low-cost environmental initiative that creates new native woodland in the UK.

Through their involvement with Carbon Capture®, Kall Kwik enables all customers who order paper/print from them to capture the CO2 emissions from their purchases by planting native woodland through the Woodland Trust and the Woodland Carbon Scheme.

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What is Carbon Capture®?

• A method of mitigating CO2 emissions and providing a reduced carbon solution for organisations
• Creates native woodland in the UK and provides habitats for wildlife and green spaces for all to enjoy
• A demonstration of an organisation’s values and responsible approach to the environment.

Woodland Carbon and The Woodland Trust

• Woodland is the second-largest sink of CO2 after the oceans
• The CO2 is captured by the planting of trees in new native woodland here in the UK through the Woodland Trust’s Government-backed Woodland Carbon Scheme
• The scheme operates under the HM Government’s 2011 Woodland Carbon Code www.woodlandcarbon.co.uk
•  100% of the Carbon Capture charge goes directly to the Woodland Trust to plant native woodland in the UK
• The Woodland Trust is the leading UK woodland conservation charity (Charity no. 294344 /SCO38885)
• Woodland Trust aims to protect and develop natural woodland throughout the UK, thereby protecting our natural heritage
• The Trust owns and manages over 1,000 free-to-visit woodland sites across the UK. The UK has just 13% woodland cover compared to the European average of 37%.

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Since joining Carbon Capture in 2019, Kall Kwik Birmingham has captured over 8500 tonnes of CO2, equating to about 210 sqm of new native woodland – roughly 35 trees!

Dene Sproson from Kall Kwik said:

“This is a fantastic achievement. Kall Kwik Birmingham and our clients should not underestimate this contribution. Whether it be 30 trees, three trees, or 3,000 trees we have helped to plant, our combined contribution to the overall programme is massive!

The critical thing we feel is that Kall Kwik Birmingham and our clients have committed to Carbon Capture®, helping to plant trees and further promote the initiative, which overall contributes to the government’s targets and commitments to NET-ZERO!”

Welcome to the Joseph Ash family Kall Kwik Birmingham. We look forward to a long relationship with you – and to planting more trees!

(Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash)

The Easter bank holidays will soon be upon us, which means our plants will be closed for the long weekend, giving our team members a well-deserved break.

If you have projects that need completing around this time, book the work in early so that we can complete it for you.

All Joseph Ash and Premier Galvanizing plants will be closed from Friday 15 April to Monday 18 April 2022.

We hope you have a great bank holiday weekend too!

We’re celebrating across the Joseph Ash Group, after landing another RoSPA Gold Award – the internationally-recognised award for demonstrating high health and safety standards.

We have received the RoSPA Gold Health and Safety Award for working hard to ensure our team members, customers, clients, and contractors get home safely to their families at the end of every working day.

Organisations receiving a RoSPA Award are recognised as being world-leaders in health and safety practice. Every year, nearly 2,000 entrants vie to achieve the highest possible accolade in what is the UK’s longest-running H&S industry awards.

The RoSPA Awards scheme is the longest-running of its kind in the UK, and receives entries from organisations across the globe.

Julia Small, RoSPA’s Achievements Director, said: “This is a fantastic and well-deserved accomplishment. All our award entrants demonstrate their unwavering commitment and passion for keeping people safe at work. By receiving this recognition Joseph Ash Galvanizing joins like-minded businesses and organisations worldwide, who represent the very best in their approach to Health and Safety. I would like to add my personal thanks for all the work that it has taken to secure this well-deserved award – congratulations to all those involved, who champion and drive up Health and Safety standards every day. You are a fantastic example to others in your sector.”

For more information about the RoSPA Awards visit www.rospa.com/awards

Last week, our Bilston plant had a visit from Pat McFadden, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East and Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Lucy Foster-Bowen (Commercial Manager) and Robert Nelson (Divisional Manager) showed him around the Bilston plant. Pat was impressed the variety of steel we process at Joseph Ash, including – in this photo – vine pickets for vineyards across Europe.

Bilston is proud of the plant and the work carried out there, so it’s always great to welcome new visitors.

An end of year message from Steven Hopkins, MD, Joseph Ash Ltd

To all our dear customers,

Another challenging year approaches its end! I have come to the view that you, our fabricator customers, and ourselves are sharing the same boat. We all had a dose of uncertainty from the start of 2021, then struggled with labour, then suffered from wage pressure from the driver sector of the workforce, then started to see material supply issues followed by considerable cost increases in just about every bought-in material and chemical. And then, to cap it all, massive increases in energy costs! Oh yes, going full circle, we come back currently to severe pressure on manufacturing wages.

So, I guess we will all be grateful to get 2021 behind us but, hang on, here we go again with possibly another destructive round of Covid! I fear that many Brits have become a bit complacent about it and have begun to ignore the high daily infection numbers, whilst we feel (perhaps with too much confidence) reasonably secured by our double or triple jabs. So caution has gone out of much of our behaviours in public. Not so, though, at Joseph Ash Group – we have never relaxed our Covid defence rules and we have kept up the mask-wearing, distancing, cleaning and detailed investigation of the movements and contacts at work of anyone testing positive for the few days before doing so. Therefore I believe that any of your drivers visiting our sites will continue to be safe, but will, of course, be asked to carry on respecting our rules.

It is difficult to predict the year ahead. Some further restrictions seem highly likely, with maybe even a short lockdown, with lessons learned from 2020 and an acceptance that the economy must continue to function. I doubt if material supply will get any easier for a while yet, and the ongoing, now routine, self-isolation of employees will keep us all several per cent short in labour. On the plus side, demand appears to be holding up. There seems to be plenty of money to fund investment in steel capital goods and projects, with many still awaiting associated materials to allow completion.

So, I wish us all luck in this manufacturing partnership boat of ours, and pray that the seas will remain reasonably calm. But, most of all, I wish that together, our staff and yours will stay healthy and content, starting with a very Happy Christmas for all, followed by a successful, safe and prosperous New Year.

Take very, very good care,

Steven

Lucy Foster-Bowen from Joseph Ash Bilston explains why in a podcast hosted by MIDFIX.

For products and solutions supporting mechanical and electrical services, the finish of the supports matter. Galvanizing is important as it plays a primary role in the protection of steel supports. Lucy Foster-Bowen from Joseph Ash Galvanizing explains why when she was invited to take part in a podcast hosted by MIDFIX. 

Lucy covers topics such as:

• What is galvanizing?
• The history of galvanizing?
• The process of galvanizing steel
• The life expectancy of a product with galvanized steel
• Venting and drainage
• A pre-galvanized finish
• The environmental impacts of galvanizing
• How galvanizing impacts M&E supports.

Watch the podcast here. It was a great session!

Thanks for inviting us MIDFIX!

(MIDFIX are experts in onsite and offsite supports for the mechanical and electrical industries, delivered through design, engineering, fabrication and industry training.)

Joseph Ash becomes an approved Driver CPC centre

At Joseph Ash Galvanizing, we strive to ensure our employees drive safely and efficiently when collecting and delivering projects to our customers. As part of this process, we provide a fleet of modern and reliable trucks and regular driver training.

Our training efforts have recently received a boost at Joseph Ash because Simon Keane – Group H&S Transport Manager – has successfully gained DCPC training centre approval from JAUPT, this allows him to train other drivers and write approved driver safety course materials. In addition, classes will be delivered to other colleagues across our plants, helping them increase their driver safety and vocational training.

Simon’s first course is titled ‘Load Build and Load Restraint Principles’. He also plans to write more classes based around:

• Driver safety
• Customer service
• Health and wellbeing
• Company policies and practices

As Simon has become an approved trainer, it means the following Joseph Ash sites are now classed as Driver CPC Training Centres:

• Bilston
• Telford
• Medway
• Walsall
• Chesterfield
• Hull

Simon aims to deliver training at all sites and invite Joseph Ash/Premier Galvanizing drivers from other sites.

Congratulations to Simon for achieving the approved status for himself and the Joseph Ash Group. This is an excellent job well done and proof that Joseph Ash continually looks after its employees and invests in its people.

Over 40 years ago, Netherton Colts FC started in the Midlands. Since then, the Club has given sporting opportunities to hundreds of local children and has positively impacted the local community. The Club currently has 13 teams across all age groups from under 7 through to open age 18+. It also runs the Netherton Colts Soccer Clinic, an open ability training scheme for boys and girls ages 4-8, introducing them to football.

This season the U7s team are playing in the Stourbridge and District Youth Football League under the Birmingham County Football Association, and Joseph Ash Galvanizing is a proud sponsor.

Matt Cooper, Netherton Colts U7s Coach told us: “The U7s team has developed a fantastic hardworking attitude and desire to improve over pre-season, and they are now seeing the rewards for their hard work. They have had a tremendous start to the season, and they are playing with so much enjoyment and getting brilliant results. This year they’ll also look great as the sponsorship money from Joseph Ash has enabled us to provide team training wear and training equipment.

“We are aware of the potential impact we can have on the young players’ lives. We hope to develop the youngsters not only as football players but also to help build their confidence, respect for people and the world around them, and play a part in having a positive impact on our communities in the future.”

Good luck for the 2021/2 season Netherton Colts U7s!