Engineering and Non-Engineering Aspects of Environmentally Sustainable Infrastructure

Sustainable infrastructure entails many engineering and non-engineering aspects.The engineering features comprise design, construction, and operation.The non-engineering features involve economics, politics, and culture/public acceptance.Sustainability as a concept is almost universally accepted by all but the ways and means to achieve it and to cover its cost are often sources of passionate debate.One of the aspects that are hard to quantify monetarily is the return on investment in sustainable versus conventional facilities.However, more people everyday recognize the strong relationship between the performance of infrastructure facilities and a sustainable environment.A sustainable environment cannot be realized by the effort of only a few.It requires the collective effort of all because every contribution adds up toward the goal of sustainability.A course has been developed to teach the basic principles of sustainability to mainly non-engineering students with background in policy development, economics, and social and natural sciences.Infrastructure is used to communicate the message of sustainability because it is a daily encounter and the members of the public can easily relate to many of its components such as roads, bridges, clean water, waste water, ports, railways, waterways, transit, aviation, energy, communication and digital networks, etc.The main goal was to illustrate the many intertwined factors that must be reconciled to attain the goal of sustainability, and that this goal can only be achieved by team effort.The course focused on preservation and conservation of materials, better and environmentally-friendly features in designed facilities, better management and operation practices, efficient repair, and low impact decommissioning techniques.The course was also greatly concerned with policies related to infrastructure financing and new models of public-private partnership, or design-build-manage operation for a certain concession period.Students in general, and non-engineering students in particular, appreciated the multidimensional nature of the issues related to sustainability as it became clear that these are multifaceted problems that require a holistic approach in addressing them.