The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is working with the infrastructure community to develop a partnership on Practice, Education and Research for Sustainable Infrastructure (PERSI). PERSI.s vision is: sustainable infrastructure supports a high and sustainable quality of life for all people in a changing world. Its mission is: to advance and incorporate concepts and knowledge of sustainability into the standards and practices used throughout the life cycle of infrastructure systems. Efforts are underway to: establish PERSI as an initiative of the infrastructure community; plan and conduct an assessment of current knowledge and practice; and develop an agenda for the implementation of best existing practices, improvement of practices to exploit available knowledge, research to fill important gaps in knowledge, and education of current and future infrastructure professionals and technicians.

With creative thinking, liabilities can become assets and older buildings can grow greener!! While green buildings are not a new idea, most of the applications have been in new construction or expensive showcases. If the green building techniques are to have a significant impact, they must be made affordable and also applicable to existing buildings to enable them to achieve the highest LEED (Leadership in energy and environmental design) certifications levels.

The Greening of a Structural Engineering Office
By Robert Silman and Helena Meryman

Sustainable engineering has finally become an important issue among structural engineers. As recently as 1996 at the IABSE Congress in Copenhagen, many structural engineers had very little notion of what sustainability meant in terms of their daily work. Many knew of the term as a global principle, but to most people it simply evoked a warm and fuzzy feeling without provoking them to consider the impact on their engineering work, without inspiring them to embrace sustainability as fundamental to good engineering practice. Today much of that has changed. Now government agencies, private clients, advocacy groups, teaching institutions and ordinary citizens demand that our impact as constructors of the built environment be environmentally responsible and concerned for the future generations of our society.

Continuous Commissioning (CC®) is an ongoing process to resolve operating problems, improve comfort, optimize energy use, and identify retrofits for existing commercial and institutional buildings and central plant facilities. This process was initiated in 1992 and formally documented in 1999 by the Energy Research Journal and in 2002 by the Continuous Commissioning Guidebook for Federal Energy Managers. The CC process has been very successful for many public facilities. A significant amount of energy savings has been achieved and documented.

.Green. or .sustainable. building design and construction has become more prevalent in the U.S. construction industry in the recent past. The terms are often used interchangeable, but there are differences between them. .Green. is a term used to address primarily the design and construction practices that impact the environment. Buildings that are designed, constructed, operated, maintained, and demolished in an environmentally friendly manner can be defined as .green. buildings. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) recognizes buildings designed and constructed using these techniques by means of its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system released in 2000 (see sidebar).