Wates Innovation Hub

The Wates Group was established in 1897 and is one of the leading privately owned, construction, development, and property services companies in the UK. It employs almost 4,000 people, working with a range of clients and partners from across the public and private sectors.

“Wates is committed to zero carbon and waste from its operations. As part of this strategy, Wates Sustainable Technology Services (WSTS) looks for better ways to design, construct and maintain buildings sustainably and our technical screening team has assessed over 40 sustainable innovation partners. We launched the Wates Innovation Network (WIN) Portal in March 2021 to help businesses ‘build back better’, connecting companies directly, and free of charge, with innovation partners who can offer solutions to help meet sustainability targets. Ecoprod’s URIMAT waterless urinals are among the Innovation Partners we feature on the WIN Portal.”

Dr Zainab Dangana – Wates Sustainable Technology Services Manager

Wates works with Clarion Housing to provide facilities management and property development services to its North London properties. It has established a North London site office in Manor House known as the Innovation Hub where it showcases the use of innovative products from the online WIN portal for customers to see how these products work in real life.

It has installed two URIMAT waterless urinals within the Innovation Hub each of which can save as much as 100,000 litres of water per year, as well as substantially reducing maintenance, cleaning and other costs associated with the operation of traditional urinals.

"We intend to be based in this office for many years and we’ve invested money in making it a nice place to work; the waterless urinals certainly help with that and we expect to be using them for the long term, so there will be significant water saving over that time when you think about how much water would be running constantly if we had old-style flushing urinals.

As well as water saving, another big benefit of the URIMAT urinals is that they emit no odour. Some people find this a bit counter-intuitive, but it really works. There’s no smell at all which is a definite improvement on traditional flushing urinals. I would definitely recommend URIMAT waterless urinals to other organisations."

Fred Owusu-Bennoah – Operations manager Wates