How can you tell if your airfield runway is “green?”
This month the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure released Envision,
a new yardstick for measuring and providing third party certification for
sustainable infrastructure projects. Use of Envision is supported
by the American Council of Engineering Companies, the American Society of Civil
Engineers and the American Public Works Association. The new rating system employs
points to evaluate five categories of 60 discreet criteria for evaluating the
environmental impact of infrastructure construction.
Hoping to become the LEED of infrastructure
projects, Envision offers a framework for engineers, owners,
developers and policymakers to objectively determine the lifetime impacts of
new infrastructure construction. “The infrastructure platform is begging for a
rating tool that will balance development and environmental concerns and return
on investment,” according to American Council of Engineering Companies President
and CEO David Raymond.
Green infrastructure policies are already being
adopted by local governments in some regions, notably by the District of
Columbia Department of Transportation for the Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue
Green Streets Project; the City of Boston Complete Streets Project; and Chicago’s
Green Streetlights installation. Beltsville, Maryland based Low Impact
Development Center Executive Director Neil Weinstein describes Envison
as a tool for concentrating on the “triple bottom line” cost benefit analysis
of infrastructure construction’s economic, social and environmental impacts. “we’re
really starting to look at infrastructure, and the way that we develop it is
quite different,” Weinstein remarked. Paul Zofnass, of the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, and one of the collaborators in Envision’s creation,
summarizes the need for the new measurement tool: “There has never been a
government that has survived if they could not provide their society, their
people, their civilization with adequate and improved infrastructure.”
