Improving Environmental Performance of Civils Projects—CEEQUAL is coming
CEEQUAL (A Civil Engineering Environmental Quality Assessment and Award Scheme) is scheduled to be launched on 9 September 2003.
CEEQUAL is intended to be a Civils equivalent to the long established BREEAM assessment scheme for buildings and aims to encourage the attainment of environmental excellence in civil engineering projects, and thus to deliver improved environmental performance in project specification, design and construction. ICE has spent the last three years leading a cross-industry team on this DTI funded project to develop the CEEQUAL methodology and business plan.
CEEQUAL will use a credit-based assessment framework, which is applicable to any civil engineering project and includes environmental aspects such as the use of water, energy and land as well as ecology, landscape, nuisance to neighbours, archaeology, waste minimisation and management, and community amenity.
A CEEQUAL award will publicly recognise the achievement of high environmental performance. Awards will be made to projects in which the clients, designers and contractors go beyond the legal and environmental minima to achieve distinctive environmental standards of performance.
ICE expects CEEQUAL to provide the following benefits:
to improve the environmental quality and public image of civil engineering schemes;
to act as an easy to use specification tool and performance benchmark;
to demonstrate commitment to high environmental performance for owners, clients, funders and regulators;
to help clients, designers and contractors to deliver improved environmental performance;
to assist the construction industry to engage in dialogue with other stakeholders such as English Nature and English Heritage;
to provide a demonstrator of designers’ and contractors’ skills and quality of service.
For contractors especially, gaining a CEEQUAL Award will improve their industry image and thus help in securing business from environmentally aware clients.
Prototype versions of CEEQUAL were tested during winter 2002 and spring 2003 by a number of organisations, including Anglian Water; Arup; British Waterways; Cornwall County Council; Costain; KBR; Northern Ireland Construction Service; Edmund Nuttall; Taylor Woodrow; and WSP. Further details are available from www.ceequal.com
Sustainability in Undergraduate Courses Education and Training Task Group Delivers Results
New guidelines on sustainable development issues in undergraduate civil engineering courses were passed in April by the Joint Board of Moderators (JBM)—the body that accredits university courses on behalf of ICE and IStructE. To comply with the guidelines, courses will need to contain elements which provide an understanding of a broad range of interrelated social, economic and environmental issues. In addition, courses will be expected to aim to produce undergraduates with the following:
Attitudes/Awareness
An overarching approach to engineering problems in the context of environmental, economic and social issues, and other dimensions including ethics and environmental justice
Skills
Ability to work with complex/ill-defined problems
Teamwork and communication skills
Ability to evaluate the merits and demerits of options/feasibility assessment
Knowledge
Broad and Deep
Technical
Environmental
Social processes
Legal
The guidelines were drafted by a Task Group set up by the ICE Council and Chaired by Prof. Paul Jowitt of Herriot Watt University. This Group is currently preparing proposals for integrating sustainability principles into the Core Objectives for training schemes leading to chartered status. A further task is to identify and meet the needs of teaching staff and trainers charged with delivering sustainability education and training. A paper on the contribution of problem-based learning to this process is being prepared for submission to a future edition of Engineering Sustainability.
ICE Sustainability Charter
In April 2003, the Council approved the ICE Charter for Sustainable Development drafted by the Environment and Sustainability Board. The document sets out ICE's commitment to sustainable development and what it expects of members. The full text of the charter appears on page 73 of this issue of Engineering Sustainability.
Unlocking Whole Life Value in Infrastructure in Buildings—ICE wins DTI support for major research project
In April 2002, ICE together with ACE, CPA, CECA and CIRIA published ‘Society, Sustainability and Civil Engineering’, a sectoral sustainability strategy. During the workshops held to develop the strategy a recurring theme was the view that encouraging the industry to increase its use of whole life costing (WLC) and (environmental) life cycle analysis (LCA) was crucial to delivering sustainable construction. More surprisingly a second theme was a tendency to use WLC and LCA interchangeably and confusion over how and when to use the two techniques. Finally a desire to fuse elements of both techniques together to produce a more rounded sense of whole life value also emerged.
Unlocking Whole Life Value in Infrastructure and Buildings—a project led by ICE with CIRIA, BRE and TRL and supported by DTI's Partners in Innovation Scheme—aims to address these problems. The project will repackage the latest WLC and LCA information into an easy-to-use guide and series of roadshows that will help the industry understand the following:
what represents value to clients?
what tools are available to measure value?
when should I use these tools?
what information will they give me?
can I use them for existing buildings and structures?
where do I get the data I need?
when do I need to involve other team members?
can I integrate the results to obtain whole life value?
how do I demonstrate the business benefits?
The project team believes that this work will have a particular appeal to clients and integrated project teams engaged in PFI or other long-term contractual relationships. The project will provide these teams with a well signposted guide through the mass of information on how to use whole life techniques to demonstrate value for money, recover initial investment and develop alternative approaches to service delivery while delivering long-term improvements to sustainability performance.
Over 15 partners from across the construction industry have already been signed up. The project team is however looking for more partners, particularly clients to ensure that the outputs reflect the current state-of-the-art. Opportunities exist to contribute ideas, cash and intellectual property to the project or to serve on the advisory group.
For further information contact Andrew Crudgington, Institution of Civil Engineers, Tel: 020 7665 2219, e-mail: andrew.crudgington@ice.org.uk
