Circular construction is a better approach to property development at a time when the industry is wasting up to 30 per cent of the resources used in building projects, according to a property development executive and the head of a university eco-design centre.

“We are trying to find the way to reduce our construction waste to zero as soon as possible, because we have a responsibility to society to minimise building waste in the environment,” Sansiri Plc’s president Srettha Thavisin said in a recent interview with The Nation.

He says his company will move towards being a green property firm in 2019.

The company is learning how to manage its construction process to reduce the volume of waste, and to reuse waste from its projects for other construction processes. In doing so, the company aims to move to “circular construction” under the “circular economy” trend, he says.

To reduce waste at the end of a building project, the company starts at the beginning stage by using the Building Information Modelling (BIM) system. The approach reduces construction waste and in the process helps to also reduce construction costs, says Srettha.

Sansiri is also investing up to Bt1 billion to expand its production pre-fabrication manufacturing capacity from 850,000 square metres of pre-fabricated products to 985,000 square metres by the middle of this year.

The new production capacity will increase the number of residential units from an average 2,000 yearly to 3,500. The volume of waste at the construction site will also be decreased when all materials are pre-manufactured, the company’s chief operating officer, Uthai Uthaisangsuk, adds.

The company is also collaborating with startup firm GooGreens, which has developed an app that will allow companies to sell their wastes to waste management firms serving Bangkok and surrounding suburbs.

This is the way to reduce waste from all of its residential projects, Uthai said.

“Circular construction is part of the circular economy, which is the way for property developers concerned about the environment to reduce waste and also improve the quality of life for people,” Assoc Professor Singh Intrachooto, head of Kasetsart University’s Creative Centre for Ecodesign, said in a recent interview with The Nation.

Singh, who is also the chief advisฌer to the Research & Innovation for Sustainability Centre (RISC), says that there has been an international discussion about how to create a circular economy in which changes to processes and products ensures that no waste is created.

“The circular economy concept is now already being used in some industries in Europe. The Netherlands has had success by using it in industry, but it is not in use in the property sector even though the sector has waste of up to 30 per cent of the total raw construction materials used in building,” said Singh.

“If the property sector managed its construction process with concern for the environment, and improved its approach to become a circular industry, that would help improve the country’s environment. It would also help people get a quality residence that is environmentally more friendly and better for the homeowner under the concept of well-being living,” he said.

RISC has researched how to achieve circular construction by reusing raw materials, says Singh, and also how to manage the construction process to reduce the volume of waste at the construction site.

“We’ve opened up our research for all property firms to use. This is a part of improving the construction process to be friendly to the environment,” he said.

According to a 2016 report by the Pollution Control Department of Natural Resources and Environment Ministry, Thailand generates 27.06 million tonnes a year of waste. Up to 30 per cent of the total are recyclable wastes and 64 per cent of organic waste can be comฌposted. Another 3 per cent is garbage that is difficult to break down, such as plastic and foam boxes, while another 3 per cent is hazardous waste such as medical packaging and batteries.

The reported also found that up to 109,500 tonnes, or about 0.5 per cent of total waste, came from construction.

Thailand spends Bt13 billion a year to manage the country’s waste, according to the department report.

“If we could manage the building process to make it circular construction, that would reduce construction waste,” Singh said.

“The construction industry could also use other waste as its raw materials for construction infrastructure, such as turning plastic waste from the sea into sidewalks,” Singh added.

“We believe that the property industry can reduce its waste and also be a part of helping the country reduce its overall waste. This is the direction that we are moving in,” Sansiri Plc president Sretha said.

Inside “The Cube” – an all-glass square building sitting on the edge of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland – more than 400 scientists and researchers are busy conducting studies to develop alternative and less harmful products to create a smoke-free future.

Andre Calantzopoulos, CEO of Philip Morris International, announced this mission in what was deemed a “revolution” in the tobacco industry in 2016 – calling on smokers to switch to smoke-free alternatives as soon as possible.

He said his company’s ambition was to replace cigarettes with less-harmful alternatives to help create a smoke-free society. Maybe, he said, one day Philip Morris will even stop producing tobacco products.

However, there are tough challenges ahead because the public is still questioning the real intentions of this 170-year old tobacco giant. It will not be easy to convince people that Philip Morris, the maker of many well-known cigarette brands, will eventually shift its focus to other products.

This shift has become a global trend, as people are becoming more concerned about their health, while smokers who are not able to quit cold turkey are turning to new innovations.

Hence, this US tobacco company decided to conduct studies as it is aware that scientific research will be the best way to convince people of its mission to replace conventional cigarettes with smoke-free products.

The company woke up to the challenge nearly a decade ago, and has been researching the subject since then, said Tinat Chowdhry, Philip Morris’ global communications manager.

It launched its first smoke-free product in Nagoya, Japan and Milan, Italy in 2014, and has invested over US$4.5 billion (Bt148 billion) in researching and developing less-harmful alternatives to cigarettes.

In 2009, the giant built “The Cube”, its first, state-of-the-art R&D facility in Neuchatel, Switzerland, and another in Singapore a year later.

Most doctors and scientists working at the Swiss facility were recruited from the fields of pharmaceuticals and life sciences, Chowdhry said.

The researchers have conducted an array of laboratory tests and done many experiments – both clinical and non-clinical – on aerosol chemistry studies in order to develop products that are less conducive to tobacco-related diseases. They have also been assessing the products’ impacts using rigorous scientific methods.

The results to date show that smoke-free products, though not risk free, are less harmful compared to cigarettes, Nuno Fazenda, manager for scientific and public communications at Philip Morris, said.

In his power-point presentation of the work done so far, he said that though smoke-free alternatives still contain nicotine, they generate no combustion and hence no smoke. He explained that nicotine is not the primary cause of smoking-related diseases, but the combustion that creates smoke is. In other words, cigarettes that burn tobacco are the main source of harm.

The pad on the left shows the impact from cigarette smoke, while the one on the right shows the effects of an aerosol PMI smoke-free product.

For instance, he said, Philip Morris’s Tobacco Heating System (THS) following the “heat-not-burn” principle automatically reduces harm.

Also, according to lab tests, aerosol is significantly less harmful and contains far fewer harmful constituents (HPHCs) than cigarette smoke. It is also a lot less toxic.

In two three-month studies – one in the US and the other in Japan – it was learned that smokers who switched completely to THS reduced their exposure to certain HPHCs based on the measurements of biomarkers of exposure. These levels of reduced exposure were close to the participants who had given up cigarettes for the three-month duration.

Research also showed negligible interest in THS products among non-smokers or among those who have quit smoking, and showed substantial potential for adult smokers to switch fully.

Response to challenge

“As a tobacco-maker, there is huge history we have to overcome. It’s difficult to change perception. It will take time,” Chowdhry said. “A lot of explaining is needed to tell people we are intentionally trying to stop selling tobacco.”

Hence, she said, Philip Morris is putting all its efforts and spending huge sums in researching smoke-free products and has even set up factories dedicated to producing THS items.

In 2015, its factory in Bologna, Italy, became the first to be fully dedicated to the production of THS units. Philip Morris is also converting some of its cigarette factories to produce “heated sticks” that are used for smoke-free devices, Chowdhry said.

“This is what we are trying to tell society – that we are serious and determined to create a smoke-free future,” she said, adding that a smoke-free future can only be achieved if more alternative products are produced and more smokers opt for them.

The World Health Organisation estimates that the number of smokers in 2025 will remain the same as now – roughly 1.1 billion. Meanwhile, Philip Morris projects that at least 30 per cent of its brand – around 40 million smokers – will switch to smoke-free products by 2025, Chowdhry said.

Laws and regulations

One of the main hurdles tobacco companies face are the complicated laws and regulations in different countries.

Thailand, for instance, has banned production, import, sale and possession of e-cigarettes since 2014, and violators can face arrest and jail.

A network of e-cigarette users called End Cigarette Smoke Thailand group earlier submitted 40,000 signatures in a campaign to legalise e-cigarettes and suggested that it be turned into a “controlled” instead of “banned” substance.

Philip Morris (Thailand) (PMTL) has echoed this, saying more appropriate regulations would be better at discouraging people from smoking.

Opponents, especially officials from the Public Health Ministry, insist that e-cigarettes remain prohibited, as they believe the devices are hazardous to health and could lure young people into smoking.

According to the Department of Disease Control, e-cigarettes are popular among teenagers because of their attractive designs and elements. The department cited many reports of youth getting addicted to conventional cigarettes or narcotics after starting the habit with e-cigarettes.

Also, the department said, e-cigarettes are hazardous to health because apart from nicotine, like conventional cigarettes, they also contain carcinogens and other harmful and addictive substances.

In response, the Commerce Ministry’s Department of Foreign Trade recently set up a working panel to review the ban.

Officials from the Department of Disease Control’s Bureau of Tobacco Control and the Office of the Consumer Protection Board arrested street vendors selling electronic cigarettes and nicotine chargers last month at the Liab Duan night market in Bangkok’s Ramindra area.  

“There is no question that tobacco products are harmful to health, and the best approach is to stop or never start smoking,” Pongsathorn Ansusinha, director of corporate affairs at PMTL, said.

Nonetheless, many people will continue smoking, but we believe they have the right to access accurate information about smoke-free products, he said.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 10.7 million Thais are smokers and 15 million are subjected to second-hand smoke, which means the total cost the country has to foot from smoking is about Bt75 billion.

A recent survey sponsored by PMTL found that 64 per cent of the 1,200 respondents, both smokers and non-smokers, want their family and friends to opt for less-harmful products due mainly to health concerns.

Pongsathorn said Philip Morris was ready to cooperate with the authorities on appropriate regulations for smoke-free products.

“But we need a clear policy,” he said.

“Smoke-free products contain nicotine, are addictive and are not risk free. But they are a better choice for smokers who want to continue using tobacco products.”

The bank will offer debt suspension for six months. Borrowers need not repay the principal or the interest amounts. The bank is also offering disaster victims emergency loans for a five-year period with a one-year grace period for debt repayment. An interest of only 0.415 per cent will be charged per month, he added.

Hasan is one of Thailand’s most experienced public relations and political communications consultants and has been practising in Thailand for more than 30 years. During that time he has been involved with many of Thailand’s major public relations challenges.

He has counselled more than 50 blue-chip organisations on their public relations needs. He has also counselled the government as well as the leaders of three political parties, more than 10 members of Cabinet, a governor, and a mayor.

His experience includes working for leading corporations in many sectors including energy and power generation, property development, financial services, travel and tourism, consumer packaged goods, edutainment, broadcasting, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and automobiles.

It is a profession that he says he drifted into. “I went into public relations right out of college. It was at a time when investment banking was becoming very popular and most of my classmates became investment bankers,” he says.

“I actually disliked public relations because it was a poorly defined profession. Nobody could understand what a public relations person did. And I liked it for the very same reason: it allowed me to do what I wanted to do and then just call it ‘public relations advice’.

Hasan says he likes looking at companies and seeing their long-term stakeholder management challenges and the things that will become problems for them long before people may generally believe that those problems could be heading their way.

“It’s like a game to see if I can guess the future in terms of what people will think and feel about a company or its products or a person. And then to start doing things that can maybe change the future for a client in terms of what people believe about them,” he says.

As for the challenges that new technology presents to the industry, he believes that it hasn’t really changed what public relations is all about.

“That sounds like a strange thing to say, but it’s true. It’s only changed the way we implement our strategies and the devising of public relations plans,” he says. “What technology has done is to add to the number and types of channels through which we can communicate and forced us to learn new ways of leveraging those powerful and new channels effectively.

“What it hasn’t changed is the most fundamental role of a public relations consultant: to understand how an audience feels about an idea or a product or an entity, and what they believe about them. And then, having understood that, to devise ways in which we can influence those feelings and convictions.

“Very often, it is simply about reframing ideas – half full or half empty? A darker shade of a clean white, or a lighter shade of a dirty black? All of this framing work is based on judgement and correctly reading public mood. If you get the framing right, it can work for you. If you frame it in a way that has low credibility, you simply waste your energies and funds, and still have a problem.”

Hasan says that an ability to read the public mood is also important because it can quickly change whether a frame works.

“The building of a great new shopping mall in a neighbourhood can rapidly change from being a welcome symbol of progress to becoming an unwelcome disruption of a way of life,” he says.

“All of this work has little to do with technology. It has a lot to do with simple commonsense, experience, instinct, and some good research. You are dealing with people and moods, and that’s something which is never easy to predict. Just ask someone who’s married.”

Hasan says technology has made it easier to deliver messages, and to do so without authentication.

“And because of that, it has created a lot more clutter and it has resulted in a lot more fake news that has made it much harder for our own messages to be believed,” he says. “While we can now get people to hear what we say more easily, it has become much harder to get people to believe what we say.

“That’s where I believe that traditional newspapers have a great asset in their mastheads. Their mastheads are a symbol of trust and third-party vetting. With the increasing industrial scale use of fake news, fake comments, fake ‘Likes’, and fake opinions that are pushed out behind products and companies by people and organisations who do it on a full-time commercial basis, the websites of these mastheads are a safe refuge of relatively reliable information.

“People sometimes forget that a newspaper’s primary role was as a guarantor of the trustworthiness of information rather than just being a channel of information. The latter role (of being a channel) has been in decline for a long time. The former role (of being a guarantor of trustworthiness) is in the ascendancy.”

He says that, in the old days, the volume of coverage and the believability of coverage generally came together.

“That’s why it was always taken for granted that anyone who got a lot of coverage of his messages would also have a lot of stakeholder support. Technology has disrupted this. The two are now separate,” Hasan says. “You can get a lot of coverage, but you may still not be guaranteed support of your stakeholders. One needs to look no further than the current national leadership to see proof of this.

“While they may have dominated every information channel in the country and have constantly been in the news across all media platforms for more than four years, it has still not guaranteed them a landslide victory in the next election. That’s because they have scored low on the ‘believability index’ as well as had some catastrophic issues with the framing of their messages.”

Hasan is encouraged by the view that technology has also increased the public’s ability to participate in any major undertaking.

“Because of that, whether one is progressing a major public project or a large private sector one, public participation and stakeholder management have become essential to their ability to succeed,” he says.

“Everyone can have an opinion that can be heard; and everyone can become a potential rallying point for massive opposition to a project.

“An effective public relations strategy now requires one to integrate a larger and more diverse pool of stakeholders into the ‘benefit sphere’ of any major project.”

Sunsweet CEO Dr. Ong-art Kittikhunchai said in 2018, production of sweet corn reached 128,000 tonnes, an increase of 25 per cent compared to the previous year.

“In 2019 our production capacity has been raised to 150,000 tonnes per year, and we will raise frozen sweet corn production from 5,000 tonnes per year to 2,000 tonnes per year,” he said.

This will raise the ratio of frozen sweet corn to 25 per cent in the company’s total production, leaving 60 per cent for canned sweet corn and 15 per cent for frozen and air-sealed sweet corn.

“Frozen and sealed sweet corn has a high margin and we are trying to lower production to balance with the amount of raw materials and orders, in order to maintain old customer base as well as catering to new customers,” he added.

Jakgrich Pibulpairoj, President of EGCO Group said in a press release issued on Friday that the power plant has prepared plans to handle the situation. They include:

1. Power plant operation

Khanom power plant is able to operate normally as well as cooperating with PTT and EGAT closely. PTT, the provider of natural gas for the power plant confirms that they can provide the gas continuously. However, in case of PTT cannot provide the gas as their promise, the power plant has reserved diesel oil to serve 3.5 days for full generation.

2. Contingency plans for flood

– The power plant has been designed and constructed to protect the wind storm and flood. The foundation of the plant was elevated 3 meters above sea level.

– The landscape of the power plant is surrounded by two mountains which are considered as shields protecting the power plant from storm.

– In case of heavy downpour around the power plant and staff residential areas, the power plant has prepared machine, equipment, and staff members to drain the flood from the site to the sea. The disposal of waste along the flood will be well managed.

– The power plant has evacuation plan for moving the staff members from the residential areas to power plant’s head office

– Cooperating with municipal migration unit to help the communities surrounding the power plant

Khanom power plant has prepared both proactive and reactive contingency plans in accordance with the international standard to deal with emergency cases to ensure prompt and effective actions.

PTTEP was represented by president and chief executive Phongsthorn Thavisin, third left, and executive vice presidents Montri Rawanchaikul, second left, and Kanok Intharawijitr, left. On hand for PEPOV were executive vice president and chief executive Mohd Anuar Taib, third right, vice president Emeliana Rice-Oxley, second right, and head of business development Abang Arabi Abang Narudin, right.

As the production platforms of Bongkot project are located in the direct path of the tropical storm, posing concerns on the safety of all staff and operations, the company has temporarily shutdown operations of the project and evacuate all staff back ashore at Songkhla province. However, production from Arthit project continues under the company’s safety measures in order to minimise impacts on the natural gas supply to the country.

The Bongkot Project is located in the southern part of the Gulf of Thailand in which PTTEP holds 66.6 per cent of participating interest. According to aforementioned situation, PTTEP expects the operation shutdown in the Bongkot Project around 4 to 7 days. As a result, average sales volume during the period is estimated to reduce by 96,700 barrels of oil equivalent per day or accounted less than 1 per cent of the average sales volume per day in 2019, according to the company’s report to the Stock Exchange of Thailand.