• Question: How do you feel that what you do is helping the Enviroment as we are fighting a battle against global warming.

    Asked by cookiehuff01 to Alex, Chris, Harriet, Jed, Ken on 13 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by picky13, bobwoodrass11, chlooee, naomid.
    • Photo: Ken Gibbs

      Ken Gibbs answered on 11 Mar 2012:

      Today, it is normal before starting a project to undertake an “EIA” (Environmental Impact Assessment). Put simply, this means that you must be sure that what you do doesn’t damage the environment by what you do.
      In the sort of work I have done, the impact has been very small indeed because drinking and community water supplies are only a very small fraction of all water use. On the other hand, disposal of “poo” has a much more significant effect on the environment and I have always tried to encourage communities to recycle their composted “poo” because this will not only reduce the smell and health problems associated with it, but can earn them quite a bit of money as well !
      You don’t have to be an engineer to know that your personal carbon footprint is probably very large. For this reason, I personally run only one car in our family and it is as “green” as it is possible to be. We use it only when necessary, walking whenever we can. I try only to use heating when it is essential. When I last went on holiday, my wife and I compared which way was likely to have the smallest carbon output (train or car or ferry or by air).

    • Photo: Jed Ramsay

      Jed Ramsay answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      A great question – especially as I work at the Environment Agency and have to consider this question in every project I do.

      It’s a real challenge as nearly everything I want to build needs diggers, cranes, boats and also usually materials like steel, concrete, timber and plastics. All these things are not great for the environment! So I have to try and make sure we use as little of these things as possible and try to re-use old materials where I can.

      I’ve also done projects where I’ve restored sections of river to be more natural. So where they have been made straight in the past, I’ve put back in more bends or where they have concrete on the river bed, I’ve removed it and put in gravel. These projects can make a big difference to the life in a river and I’m lucky to be able to work on them.

    • Photo: Alexander Zacheshigriva

      Alexander Zacheshigriva answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I have to admit that the industry that I work in is damaging to the environment as a whole. Shipbuilding is a messy process, takes a lot of energy, steel, paint and other chemicals. However the need for shipping in general and naval vessels in particular is there and is not going to disappear any time soon. What we can do is try to make them “cleaner” and more efficient. This involves both the building stage and the actual use of the ships. I have been involved in a project for integrating ballast water treatment plants on navy ships.

      Ballast water is carried by ships to get them to sit right in the water and to make them more efficient (higher speed, less fuel usage). This means that water is taken onboard from the sea and then dumped out somewhere else. However the problem with doing this is that it can move some species (algae, fish, crabs, jelly fish) from their natural habitat to an alien one. This may be a tragedy for an individual fish, but more importantly these species may find the new environment easy to multiply in (no natural predators) and will very soon overpopulate the area pushing other species out. A bit like stouts in New Zealand or grey squirrels in UK, hence we had to find solutions that would fit in on the boats and effectively solve this problem.

    • Photo: Harriet Fletcher

      Harriet Fletcher answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Everything I do is to help the environment really. Most of my work is about keeping our rivers clean from sewage. There is a compromise to be made because, whilst it is possible to clean every bit of pollution from water it takes energy and chemicals to to it so we work with the environment agency to come up with the least damaging solution. Also, building stuff is really environmentally damaging and increasingly we are thinking about that cost. Carbon accounting is growing hugely and the carbon cost of a project is often included with the design proposal now. It is such an complicated and interesting thing to fully understand the impact we make on the environment because so much is a trade off between one type of damage and another.
      The other part of my work is dealing with the sludge (basically poo) that is separated from the sewage. This is usually digested so it breaks up and generates methane, in the bad old days the methane was just burned on site but now it is used to fuel engines that generate electricity. In one case, the biogas is cleaned up and piped to peoples houses to fuel their central heating and cookers and that’s really exciting. Again, the carbon cost of building these engines must be considered but the renewable energy source is astounding (Thames water alone produce enough power to run 10000 homes). The solids that are left are sold to farmers to use as fertilisers (after being sterilised) and that saves a whole heap of chemical phosphorus and nitrogen being used in it’s place.
      Like Ken, I try very hard to minimise my personal carbon footprint because I think it’s really important. We have solar panels and I try not to use the car if I can avoid it we recycle about three times as much as we throw away and we don’t fly on holiday and usually camp. My most green project so far is making an eco-shopping bag from the bottom of a pair of jeans I cut off to make shorts, I felt like a proper eco-warriror that day.

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