Sustainable infrastructure
As the first organisation in Australia to register an infrastructure project with the ISCA Infrastructure Sustainability (IS) tool, we are committed to designing, building and operating sustainable assets.
Sustainability Scorecard
The sustainable scorecard assessment is an in-house process aimed at ensuring all social, environmental, cultural and financial impacts, and opportunities are identified before a project is delivered. This tool is embedded into the planning process of all of our infrastructure projects to provide a qualitative sustainability assessment.
The enlarging of Cotter Dam delivered long-term sustainability outcomes for Icon Water. The sustainability features which contributed to this include:
- Reuse of resources whenever possible. A million tonnes of aggregate was retained on site to be crushed and used in the construction of the dam wall. This saved nearly 3 million kilometres in construction vehicle journeys, as well as saving precious materials.
- Providing artificial habitat to provide shelter for threatened fish species and secure the survival of the last viable population of the endangered Macquarie Perch in the ACT.
- Local recreation areas were improved - the Cotter Avenue recreation area was upgraded and a Cotter Dam Heritage Discovery Trail was created together with a dam viewing platform. A specific environmental education program for the dam was developed for 6-18 year olds with around 1,600 pupils already completed the program.
- All carbon emissions associated with the construction and operation of the project are being offset through carbon forestry offsets.
- An advanced septic system was designed to fit neatly into a 6 metres shipping container for ease of transportation. No other septic system available on the market had the capabilities of simply being lifted onto a flat-bed truck for transportation to another project, ready for operation. This concept can now be reused in other construction projects worldwide.
- Solar powered traffic lights were used to control construction-related traffic, car-pooling occurred among site staff, using bio-diesel where possible for onsite construction activities were examples of emission reduction programs.
