Improving the sustainability approach of integrated infrastructural projects

Abstract

Based on the research to the opportunities in the civil engineering sector, there can be concluded that the amount and the types of the opportunities differs per project category. The most striking aspect in the elaboration of the different opportunities is that the most influential opportunities are (partly) driven by impacts on external factors. Due to improvements in the design of a civil engineering project, great benefits can be obtained at external factors in the field of sustainability. A typical example is the reduction of rolling resistance. this reason an important conclusion might be that in future, more focus need to be given on the influences on external factors, whereas improvements at the project itself will become less emphatically. It even might be the case that less sustainable solutions in the construction of the project itself will become very sustainable as a result of spectacular improvements to the external factors. In the course of the research it has also become clear that for the application of a sustainability approach it is essential to define a coherent and correct strategy where a thorough attention is needed for each layer in the strategy. It can be noticed that, based on the experiences as a result of the evaluation of a couple of sustainability approaches, in many cases insufficient attention is given to the correct formulation of a sustainability approach. As long as the ambitions and the applied criteria in the procurement process are not coherent to each other, the ambitions can be well stated, the criteria can be well formulated, but still the mission, vision and objectives will not be met. This results in an improperly functioning approach. The conclusions (advice) for the improvements of current sustainability approach of DBI are already mentioned in the previous chapter.