Community & The Environment

We are proud to give financial and volunteer support to the following local charity organisations and community groups:

· Rye Harbour Sailability give people of all ages, with a wide range of physical and mental disabilities, the chance to experience the fun and freedom of sailing in adapted dinghies with an experienced helmsman and crew. For details see their website - www.ryeharboursailability.org. As their Chair has said “Launched in August 2017, the number of people with disabilities visiting Rye Harbour Sailability to sail in a dinghy at Rye Harbour keeps growing, along with the continued support and sponsorship from the local community and businesses.  We are especially grateful to businesses like EPS Design of Ashford who support us.  RYA Sailability is an incredible programme - largely run by volunteers – that gives people with disabilities, or those with specific requirements, the chance to regularly take part in activity on the water. Rye Harbour Sailability, a small charity, is proud to be one of over 200 venues based in the UK giving people with disabilities the opportunity to experience the fun and freedom of sailing in dinghies at Rye Harbour”.

We try to minimise the effects of our work on the environment in the following ways:

· All of our output, including calculations, drawings and reports, is produced and sent electronically. We do not produce any paper documents.

· Since moving into our current office in 2018, we have worked on a flexible basis with all staff working from home much of the time. This reduces travel, minimises the size of office we need and had the unexpected benefit of allowing us to easily adjust to the Covid-19 restrictions which began in 2020. It allows our staff to more easily balance their work and home lives, including child care responsibilities. 

· We encourage the use of virtual meetings with clients, usually using Microsoft Teams or Zoom, to reduce travel. 

· We try to minimise, and if possible avoid, the use of concrete in our designs. Concrete has a particularly high environmental cost so we prefer to design in timber, which is a renewable resource, or steel which can be recycled at the end of its life. Concrete is often unavoidable in foundations for practical reasons but it is company policy not to design any reinforced concrete superstructures as we believe that timber and steel are far more environmentally responsible.