CIRCULAR ECONOMY:
NO TIME TO STROLL DR. ANUMITRA MIRTI, AN ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE RESILIENCE SPECIALIST AND BECA’S NEWLY APPOINTED SUSTAINABILITY ADVISOR, SHARES HER INSIGHTS ON THE STATE OF CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN THE ROADS AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECTOR.
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r. Anumitra Mirti joined Beca earlier this year to lead the group’s first dedicated decarbonisation and sustainability advisory service in Australia. As a researcher with the University of New South Wales, she has studied the impact of climate change and extreme weather events on infrastructure health. In her former capacity as Strategic Environmental Planning Manager for the Central Coast Council in New South Wales, she has helped deliver projects on climate change, sustainability, disaster resilience and greening visions. She is now excited about the prospect of helping implement circular economy frameworks through projects and initiatives led by Beca. More broadly, she’s invested in creating a wider impact on the industry by helping facilitate decarbonisation strategies for Beca’s clients. “I want to make real impact on the ground, and to eradicate the narrowness in thinking,” she tells Roads & Infrastructure. As one of Asia Pacific’s largest independent advisory, design and engineering consultancies, Beca helps deliver major road, highway, railway, bridge and airport projects within the region. As such, the group’s initiatives have a high impact on the market and the rest of the industry. “At Beca, we have a sustainability strategy, which focuses on both Beca’s performance – which we call our footprint, as well as on how we create impact in the market – which we refer to as our handprint,” says Mirti. “I joined Beca because of the opportunity to influence across sectors. Beca is at the forefront of delivering critical infrastructure projects, so I believe Beca’s role is to be
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ROADS APRIL 2022
part of the solution, working with upstream and downstream clients to facilitate conversations around decarbonisation.” It is through this advisory role that Mirti is looking to generate collective impact on moving the infrastructure sector towards circularity. The first step, she says, is acknowledging that the pace of change needs to accelerate. “Infrastructure projects are responsible for 70 per cent of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. With hundreds of billions of dollars committed to infrastructure and construction projects, there’s a real opportunity for us to be innovative and bring new ideas into the future. This is the least advanced area where we can facilitate net zero thinking and meet our goal of limiting global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius,” she says. And yet, major hurdles remain on the way, particularly with respect to the use of secondary construction materials that have zero, or lower, greenhouse gas emissions. IMPACT OF MATERIALS The steel, cement and aluminium industries each produce about seven to nine per cent of annual global greenhouse emissions. This embodied carbon is in addition to emissions produced in the process of transporting materials to project sites. Cement, as one of the key ingredients of any construction project, remains highly carbon intensive. The burning of limestone to create quicklime – a key ingredient of cement – released significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to direct emissions from cement production.
Dr. Anumitra Mirti has been appointed to lead Beca’s decarbonisation and sustainability advisory service in Australia.
“Forget about everything else. If we continue to use cement, we are not going to be able to meet our target for 2050,” says Mirti. Realising the need for construction materials to align with net zero carbon targets, the World Wide Fund (WWF) last year initiated the formation of Materials and Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance (MECLA), which is supported by the New South Wales Government’s Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. The goal of MECLA is to bring different sectors together across the building and construction supply chain to gain a better understanding of barriers to uptake. Observing that the initiative is a “good start for bringing industry together,” Mirti says
