Risk-based approaches to sustainability in civil engineering

Infrastructure project sustainability assessment typically entails the use of specialised assessment tools to measure and rate project performance against a set of criteria. This paper looks beyond the prevailing approaches to sustainability assessments and explores sustainability principles in terms of project risks and opportunities. Taking a risk management approach to applying sustainability concepts to projects has the potential to reconceptualise decision structures for sustainability from bespoke assessments to becoming a standard part of the project decisionmaking process. By integrating issues of sustainability into project risk management for project planning, design and construction, sustainability is considered within a more traditional business and engineering language. Currently, there is no widely practised approach for objectively considering the environmental and social context of projects alongside the more traditional project risk assessments of time, cost and quality. A risk-based approach would not solve all the issues associated with existing sustainability assessments but it would place sustainability concerns alongside other key risks and opportunities, integrating sustainability with other project decisions.

In-situ strength assessment of concrete - The European Concrete Frame Building Project (Reprinted from Non-Destructive Testing Civil Engineering, April, pg 583-592, 2000)

A full-scale seven-storey in-situ advanced reinforced concrete building frame was constructed in the Building Research Establishment's Cardington laboratory encompassing a range of different concrete mixes and construction techniques. This provided an opportunity to use in-situ non-destructive test methods, namely Lok and CAPO tests, on a systematic basis during the construction of the building. They were used in conjunction with both standard and temperature-matched cube specimens to assess their practicality and their individual capabilities under field conditions. Results have been analysed and presented to enable comparisons of the performance of the individual test methods employed.