Project Sustainability
Hatch Mott MacDonald engineers and helps clients build infrastructure projects. Many of these, by design, are intended to mitigate environmental impacts. For example, wastewater treatment plants are traditionally designed to reduce the impact of wastewater discharges so that they have a minimal environmental and ecological impact. Even so, it is possible to design and construct such facilities in a way which reduces the environmental impact of the facilities construction and operation. HMM’s external focus is to consider feasible sustainable elements in all of our projects, seeking third-party certifications where applicable or desired (LEED, STARS, etc.). Since incorporating sustainability principles must be done deliberately, the firm has developed a proprietary guide which provides our staff with a process which is implemented at the beginning of a project to assure that sustainability principles are considered at an early stage, and throughout the development of the project.
Our “Sustainability Guide” is part of our work process, and incorporates the use of a number of tools which are designed to assess the impact and footprint of a project and alternatives at the planning stage. Some of the tools which we employ (developed largely by our parent firms Hatch and Mott MacDonald) include:
- INDUS: Integrated Design and Sustainability Methodology. INDUS integrates sustainable development criteria into project work providing an appraise framework to guide clients to their sustainability objectives. It relies on using the three pillars of sustainability: economy, society, and environment.
- QA4: 4-Quadrant Analysis. A simple but powerful decision-making tool. The core principle is driving initiatives that lower costs and social/ecological impacts simultaneously. Used to optimize development concepts.
- CapIT. A construction costing process that produces both construction schedule pricing and a carbon footprint assessment.
- LifeCYCLE. A secure web-based application and database that measures both project costs and carbon footprint over the whole life of a project (available for building and highway projects).
- FutureWatch. Compares a project’s sustainable development footprint, with a comparison to industry best practices.
- GEO. Permits an assessment of sustainability for geo-engineering aspects of a project.
- Sustainable Bridges Toolkit
- Water Sustainability Tool
A more detailed presentation of HMM's approach to incorporating sustainability principles into our working processes can be found in the Sustainability section under "Expertise" in the main menu.
