Infrastructure Sustainability Council
ON THE JOURNEY TO
CIRCULAR ECONOMY ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE SPEAKS TO AINSLEY SIMPSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE SUSTAINABILITY COUNCIL, ABOUT THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF EMBEDDING CIRCULAR ECONOMY, WHILE REFLECTING ON DISCUSSIONS FROM THE COUNCIL’S CONNECT CONFERENCE IN MAY, 2021.
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hen representatives from the infrastructure and transport authorities gathered to discuss ‘Building a Circular Economy’ at the Infrastructure Sustainability Council Connect Conference earlier this year, their views seemed to resonate most around one idea: That embedding circular economy into roads and infrastructure projects goes beyond reuse and re-purposing of waste material. Rather it requires a fundamental shift in the way infrastructure projects are planned, even before the tender process begins. In her role as Deputy Director General at the Department of Transport and Main Roads Queensland, Amanda Yeates is responsible for the delivery of about $4.5 billion worth of infrastructure program for transport in Queensland, which equates to around 4000 projects at any given time. Sharing an example of a project three years ago, one of the first on which the Department had consulted with the Infrastructure Sustainability Council, Ms Yeates demonstrated how better social, economic and environmental outcomes could be driven by sending the right signals to the market. “There was an example on the Bruce Highway in Queensland where we sent a signal to the market and said that we were going to put a 60 per cent weighting on the environmental criteria in the tender process. I had many of the contracting partners ring me up and ask whether there was a typo in the tender. They thought maybe we meant six per cent. I said no, we definitely meant 60 per cent,” she said. The project, as she further explained, benefited from this strict consideration as the winning tender ended up performing 24
ROADS OCTOBER 2021
Ainsley Simpson, CEO, the Infrastructure Sustainability Council.
better than standard with regards to erosion and sediment control during the heavy rainfall season. “Now that cost us about four per cent above what our tender construction estimate was, and we went ahead with that. But what happened was because our controls were so good, when we did get that heavy weather, the project wasn’t shut down for anywhere near as long as what it would have been, had we done something traditional. We also ended up finishing that job six months ahead of schedule and that was a saving of $143 million,” she added. A BROADER WAY OF THINKING Tony Aloisio, Director of Ecologiq – a Victorian Government initiative to optimise the use of local recycled and reused materials in government infrastructure – also noted that the definition of circularity
eventually needs to move beyond materials recycling. “I think the definition of circularity needs to move beyond the materials to a broader way of thinking, and that is about regenerative design,” he said. “It’s no longer just about the constructability of a piece of infrastructure. It’s also making sure that it’s an efficient and a well-used piece of infrastructure. It’s also about adding de-constructability for its renewal. Maybe modularisation is a future way of getting there. All that leads to a sort of systems thinking approach as opposed to a project-by-project design and build approach. Circularity will be there when we’ve got that full regenerative sort of design well built in and at the same time, we focus on what we can do now in terms of recycling and reuse of problematic waste materials,” he added. KEY CHALLENGES AHEAD Ainsley Simpson, the Infrastructure Sustainability Council’s Chief Executive Officer, says the challenges to driving more circular economy, and particularly more innovation, across the infrastructure sector are many-fold and progressing with varying pace across different states. The first challenge to overcome, she says, is a lack of consistent policy objectives. “Historically, there has been inconsistent policy objectives around such things as consideration of innovative and recycled materials across infrastructure projects,” she says. “However, the introduction of the National Waste Policy Action Plan has created a level playing field with a call to action for all levels of government to increase recycled content use in what they do and to show
