Thursday 8 January 2015

Putting it into practice 1: How do we live within our limits?

This post is part of a series inspired by the book "Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into Practice" (see the introduction to the series here). Having examined the issue of planetary boundaries (Principle 1) in my last post, how can we put this knowledge into practice in real civil engineering situations? 

Two "operational" rules of thumb are proposed to ensure that all our buildings, transport etc protect rather than damage our planet's capacity to support life:

1.1: Set targets and measure against environmental limits
"If you can measure it, you can manage it"
That was the mantra of my boss in my first engineering job at a toothpaste factory in Manchester, and I was duly put to work helping him to measure every aspect of how the plant worked, from creating a database to monitor maintenance of equipment to analysing the causes and costs of downtime. 
This approach worked then by highlighting areas for improvement and driving a better understanding of the real problems. In the same way, measurement is a key driver for performance improvement in sustainability as well. 
Setting targets for a broad range of requirements (resource use, waste minimisation, energy consumption, maintenance and whole life cost) can stimulate innovation by encouraging a wider range of options to be considered.  
For example, whole life costing allows options to be considered which reduce maintenance or energy use over the life of an asset, which can justify a slightly higher initial investment for a lower lifetime cost. Whole life costing is now being implemented for all rail projects during CP5 (the current rail investment period for Network Rail, which runs from April 2014 to April 2019). 

You can also apply a sustainability hierarchy to all project options, such that environmental limits are respected and managed. Option 1 is the most sustainable, option 6 is least sustainable. 
  1. Reduce (or manage) demand, thereby reducing resource use and pollution at source – most sustainable option.
  2. Make existing assets more productive or extend their life (unless retrofitting results in large increases in energy use)
  3. Build a small project (smaller scale impacts are likely to be less damaging)
  4. Build multiple decentralised small projects (more resilient than big projects, and environmental impacts/pollution may be more readily absorbed into the local environment without overwhelming it)
  5. Build a large project with environmental mitigation, ie taking major steps to avoid and compensate for impacts (eg replacing habitat loss)
  6. Build a large project without mitigation – unacceptable. 

1.2: Structure businesses and projects sustainably
Most economies are based on a linear model (buy, use, dispose), which coupled with an economic system based upon endless growth leads to a fundamentally unsustainable system: over-consumption uses more and more resources and produces more and more waste, with no regard for natural limits.

In setting business strategy and scoping infrastructure projects, we have the opportunity to challenge this approach. For example, most infrastructure contracts are currently based on selling a product (water, energy, rail capacity) for a certain price per unit, so the incentives drive selling more and more product. An alternative approach based on a “service” model (such as maintaining an office building at an acceptable temperature all year round) rather than delivery of a product (eg fuel) is incentivised to provide that service by using as little fuel as possible (eg through insulation and effective management of heating and cooling demand). This is an idea which I'd like to see more over the next few years!


Reference:
Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into Practice, Charles Ainger and Richard Fenner, ICE Publishing, 2014

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