Are We Really Designing Sustainable Projects?

by Peter A. Richardson, PE, LEED AP, Vice President, Green International Affiliates, Inc.

 

So you think you’re incorporating “sustainability” into your design projects these days? Certainly, if you are designing a site development project that is pursuing LEED certification or a project that has to comply with the MA Wetlands Protection Act, you will no doubt be incorporating some “green building”, Low Impact Development (LID) and/or stormwater Best Management Practices (BMP’s) techniques into your design, with the goal of mitigating impacts to the environment. But how many of us truly have the opportunity to consider the “triple bottom line” of sustainability (i.e. the overall environmental, economic and social impacts) for the projects we work on and for that matter, have the knowledge and training we need to go about it?

 

Let’s face it, most times the projects we design are based on someone else’s vision. A developer wants to develop a site for commercial or residential use with the primary goal being to maximize profit or a public agency wants to build new infrastructure in order to improve its operations or increase capacity. In both cases, a Request for Proposals is issued to design the project, which has already been conceptualized by someone else. While we can say we consider the triple bottom line in our designs because we design projects within a budget (economic), comply with environmental regulations and address abutter/neighborhood issues (social), very rarely do we have the opportunity to provide our expertise while the project is being conceptualized or even more rarely do we have a say whether it’s the right project in the first place from a sustainability perspective. Even engineers who work for public agencies (including consultants) that are involved in the planning and conceptualization of large infrastructure projects are usually bound by strict goals that need to be achieved for a particular portion of the agency’s infrastructure system and do not get the opportunity to weigh in on what the most sustainable approaches for the agency’s entire system and/or operations are.

 

ASCE is trying to change the role of civil engineers when it comes to sustainability by being a founding member of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) and offering an online course on the Fundamentals of Sustainable Engineering (www.asce.org). Having refined its definition of sustainability over the past few years, ASCE wants to make sure that civil engineers have the knowledge and expertise that will ensure we are sought after as valued team members when large infrastructure projects are being planned and conceptualized. The major premise for doing this is that our current approach to designing and constructing infrastructure projects is not sustainable. Development in the world is already exceeding the biocapacity of our natural resources to replenish themselves, our economy is seeing the harsh competitive realities of new and emerging economies in other nations, costs from natural disasters continue to spiral out of control and the costs for needed infrastructure improvements in the United States are in the trillions of dollars with no clear plan on how to pay for them.

 

I had the opportunity to take ASCE’s online Fundamentals of Sustainable Engineering course last fall (and received my certificate!) and it was an eye opening experience. There were many new concepts related to sustainability that as a civil engineer, I had never been exposed to. Concepts like the earth’s natural life support systems and how engineers should apply principles of sustain-ability to preserve them; By-Product Synergies; the “Five Capitals” suppor-ting economic growth; Community/Individual Behavior Social Factors; the Human Development Index (HDI); Sustain-ability Quadrant; Eco-logical footprint; and Project Pathway/Perfor-mance were all new to me. Thankfully, there were some concepts in the course that were familiar, such as Life Cycle Cost and Cost/Benefit Assessments; Environmental Assessments; and Environmental Policies, Regu-lations and Innovation.

 

Having taken the ASCE course, I now have a much better handle on the challenges that our profession will face in the future, and they are daunting. While I applaud ASCE’s efforts to bring attention to needed infrastructure investment through the Infrastructure Report Card for America (and will continue to advocate for more investment myself), it has become obvious to me that we cannot simply keep asking for more money to continue doing things the way we have in the past. It is truly a different world today and it’s time for civil engineers to step up and take a leadership role in public policy and to develop new innovative ways of delivering the right infrastructure projects that meet the needs of society in a sustainable way. It will not be easy and will take time, but not doing so will ensure that our profession becomes relegated to a technical service commodity in the not too distant future.