Sustainability the Winner for NorthLink WA

The partnership we built with contractor John Holland to develop a sustainability culture across the NorthLink WA southern section team has delivered award-winning results.

Setting and pursuing ambitious targets the team worked together to achieve a ‘leading’ rating score of 93 – the highest WA score ever and the second highest Infrastructure Sustainability (IS) Council of Australia score in Australia for a transport infrastructure project.

The team also took out two 2017 Sustainability in Infrastructure Awards.

• The IS Impact Award recognises the project that exhibits the most outstanding leadership and greatest contribution to advancing infrastructure sustainability in Australasia.
• The IS Outstanding Achievement Award recognises the IS certified project that has demonstrated the highest overall excellence and sustainability achievements.

Aiming to deliver a genuinely sustainable project, the southern section team embraced the sustainability challenge and used it as a catalyst to promote innovation across all areas of economic, environmental and social responsibility.

The team’s commitment to reframing the engineering challenge achieved sustainability initiatives across design, procurement and construction phases.

Lifecycle assessment tools were used to assess the environmental aspects and potential impacts of the project over its design life, enabling the potential impacts to be evaluated and interpreted to better inform decision-makers.

Some of the initiatives include:

• adaptive and dimming lighting
• asphalt treatments that improve and extend the life of pavement as well as optimising recycled product
• design initiatives including a three-pin arch pedestrian underpass
• awareness raising including a supplier sustainability day
• a four metre-wide shared path for pedestrians and cyclists
• a grade-separated roundabout at Morley Drive offering safety benefits for motorists and a reduction of conflict points; this encourages a free-flowing interchange that reduces congestion and associated emissions
• trial of a solar powered permanent Variable Message Sign using wireless communication technology.

We define sustainability as a commitment to ‘creating lasting benefits through an integrated consideration of social, environmental and economic aspects in all that we do’. To facilitate this commitment, sustainability has been included across all NorthLink WA project objectives.