| Upping the ante on environmental stewardship |
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| Upping the ante on environmental stewardship |
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Recycling rebar is good stewardship.
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To provide the best results for Oregon motorists, we at ODOT set the bar high for ourselves and our contractors, including in our stewardship of the environment. In addition to safeguarding habitats and species, we strive to make our construction practices increasingly green.
The OTIA III bridge program’s recently released Third Annual Monitoring Report for Materials and Contamination demonstrates the success of a proactive strategy for managing construction sites, materials and waste, and contamination discovery.
Four years ago, Hal Gard and Bill Ryan, at that time members of the Bridge Delivery Unit and currently with the Geo-Environmental section, and Jennie Armstrong, also of Geo-Environmental, set in motion the environmental performance standards for materials and contamination used on the bridge program. They and other staff members worked with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to integrate and coordinate environmental protection, permitting and enhancements into the bridge program.
A reliable set of environmental performance standards gives contractors the flexibility to work in ways that take the environment into account and greater certainty that they’ll be in compliance, two strong incentives for them to keep track of how they use and potentially reuse materials.
“An outcome-oriented approach to environmental management makes for good relationships all around, which speeds up decision making,” said Geoff Crook, environmental program manager for BDU.
A key aspect of the materials standards is the management of construction waste debris to its “highest and best end use.” The report documents that ODOT’s solutions in reusing construction debris have been many and varied: four detour structures that reuse some of the same initial 80 beams; 30,000 cubic yards of concrete rubble exchanged between two jobs sites, saving disposal fees in one case and the cost of fill in another; and 300 felled trees shipped to the Umpqua River for use by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to improve habitat for threatened Oregon Coast coho salmon.
In the past, ODOT contracts have required construction companies to estimate volumes of materials for reuse and recycling, such as concrete, asphalt, metal and wood, but did not require them to submit a report to the agency detailing their efforts, nor did they require targeted amounts of reuse and recycling.
To address this chicken-and-egg conundrum—without data on how much recycling and reuse is being accomplished, how can we set reasonable targets?—ODOT initiated the Construction Waste Management Program. For 2008, the bridge program is including special provisions in construction contracts to improve data collection and better track waste management activities. Construction companies are asked to forecast the percentage of materials they anticipate reusing or recycling on their bridge projects and submit quarterly reports about their progress. Voluntary reporting received from construction sites for the past two years indicated a documented savings to the bridge program of at least $900,000; the new required reporting will certainly show much higher results.
Such tracking and reporting is common in vertical construction—that is, buildings—but is rare in highway, or linear, construction. So when it comes to the environment, ODOT is setting goals that are lofty yet reachable. In the end, this foresight will help the agency ensure that Oregon will have not only a much-improved highway infrastructure but a set of guidelines for increasingly green construction practices.
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