Ivor Richards

Ivor Richards OBE B.Sc. CEng. MICE FIHT, joined the company in 1994 - the year
he was awarded his OBE
A chartered engineer since 1972, he is Chairman and Managing director of Richards
Moorehead and Laing Ltd (RML). RML is an engineering and environmental
consultancy that Ivor and his wife Marjorie established in 1984.
He and Marjorie spent 11 years in the water industry in South Wales which included
recovery work at Aberfan in 1966, a disaster that triggered the realisation that mineral exploitation did have serious consequences. This has dominated Ivor's work to the present day.
In 1972 he joined a consultancy that sprang out of the work at Aberfan. Much of the
work was innovative. Having studied geography and geology at UCL Ivor expanded the
engineering office into a multidisciplined one.
Ivor's career has been spent producing and diffusing guidelines of good practice in mineral
working and land reclamation in the UK and Europe. A favourite book, Working
with nature - a low cost approach to land reclamation' was first published in 1982.
With Mervyn Bramley, a fellow Water Conservator, Ivor was responsible for the 1990 CIRIA report
on 'The use of vegetation in civil engineering'. Recent interests have involved research
and construction involving live willow as an engineering material, the development of low weight
structural panels and a process that destroys Japanese Knotweed.
Ivor's current interests include a new hydrocarbon-free porous material for use in
footpaths and lightly trafficked areas and low maintenance grasses that will create
carbon sinks in public areas.