Croydon, Queen’s Square

London feels like it is constantly being rebuilt; nowhere is that more evident than in Croydon which has 11 multi-million pound developments in process during any given month. The resulting pollution and congestion that these sites cause is a serious concern to local communities and the traveling public.

Croydon Council has been at the forefront of investments to manage environmental impact. They have established the town centre as an Air Quality Management Area, and have promised to work with communities making Croydon the most sustainable borough in London. With a new development at Queen’s Square, opposite the Town Hall, there was a great opportunity to help realise this aspiration.

With more than 270 significant planning applications at any one time, Croydon Council found it challenging to collect and collate data from each site to know if impacts are being well managed. To achieve Croydon’s commitment to air quality management, it was important to have a tool that would automate monitoring and reporting, send alerts when pollutants reach harmful thresholds, or machine plant and vehicle activity breached agreed restrictions.

EMSOL recognised their dilemma and proposed developing their existing site emissions management system to provide a new multi-site Council-facing dashboard with an intuitive and powerful reporting dashboard. The first step was for EMSOL to fuse pollution sensor data with tagged asset and vehicle data then deliver a real-time view of air quality at Queens Square. All of this data is presented within informative reports, dashboards, and live site maps, for easy feedback to the council and contractor via the EMSOL system.

EMSOL helps us to target enforcement against non-compliant site vehicle activity and pollution
CROYDON COUNCIL

A key feature of the EMSOL system is correlating the emissions data from sensors with tagged vehicle data, thereby, intelligently monitoring emissions thresholds and identify offending assets. These insights enable the council and contractor to take targeted action in mitigating the environmental impact of the site and pinpoint specific problem assets or drivers.

Next Steps

Croydon Council, already an innovator in environmental compliance, took a step towards supporting the health and wellbeing of those working and living in urban areas by managing the real-world air quality impact at Queen’s Square. EMSOL has been a partner to enable this vision of minimising air pollution, with the next investment for improving the Croydon community around reducing noise pollution.

The EMSOL system not only supports air quality monitoring and intelligence for targeted action, but can support noise pollution monitoring with intelligence for targeted action. EMSOL is now working with Croydon to make their goal a reality. As an early adopter in deploying intelligent air quality monitoring, it was essential to ensure that council, contractor, and local community could all see the benefits of taking action to improve air quality and that EMSOL could be easily integrated into their existing processes. Construction projects, such as Queen’s Square, offer real benefits for the local community, so they shouldn’t start by damaging the local environment. Innovative approaches to improving air and noise quality can help manage that impact.

Find out more about how EMSOL can help your organisation – contact us.