Embedding sustainability into utilities projects

As the global population continues to grow rapidly and move towards a more urban-based settlement, the need for key infrastructure that enables these urban centres to thrive, to become more interconnected and sustainable, also grows at an unprecedented rate. Thus, it is urgent that key stakeholders in cities become aware of the importance of developing sustainable infrastructure in order to influence core economic activities and promote social wellness for their citizens. Once the need for sustainable infrastructure is recognised, the next step is to plan, develop, retrofit, and maintain infrastructure in a sustainable manner. With buried utility services playing such a significant role in the function of cities, operators face multiple challenges to continue to feed into key infrastructures that underpin everyday life. Existing sustainable assessment frameworks are not designed for utility projects and so fail to adequately capture all the key aspects needed to meet these key challenges. This paper proposes a new sustainability assessment framework for utility projects combining BIM and ENVISION, to allow designers to determine the overall sustainability of a number of different utility solutions, from the design through to the construction stages. The new tool is integrated within BIM and therefore can be fully embedded in the project rather than being an add on tool.