Sustainable capital projects: leapfrogging the first cost barrier

Abstract

Multitudinous strategies, technologies, and best practices exist to improve the sustainability of a capital project, but comparatively few of these tactics have been successfully applied in green building projects without increasing first cost. Given typically constrained budgets available for capital projects, the challenge to project managers, designers, and other project stakeholders is to identify and justify the use of cost-neutral or cost-saving sustainability features that can be included on their projects to meet increasingly stringent sustainability goals set by project owners. The objective of this paper is to identify and describe a set of techniques for finding cost effective sustainability strategies for capital projects. The paper includes a case study of an exemplary capital project from the US to illustrate a set of techniques for identifying cost-neutral or cost-saving project options. These techniques include effective problem framing, identification and exploitation of cost discontinuities through integrated design and right-sizing, dematerialisation, leveraging of free resources, and holistic cost management. The paper includes an overview of each technique and recommendations for applying that technique in project planning, design, and implementation.

Keywords:

• green
• building
• sustainable
• cost
• barriers
• capital
• project