Engineers have a duty of care for the environment and communities. We must continue to push for sustainability in our building projects, and we need to take off the blinkers.
AECOM is at the centre of the sustainability community, being a member of the British Council for Sustainable Development, a gold leaf member of the UK Green Building Council and the originators of BREEAM with BRE about 20 years ago.

As a director of our Sustainable Development Group, I am delighted by the manner in which buildings, new and old, have become greener during the last 20 years. Since the BRE Environmental Assessment method was introduced, this has been continuously improved, widening the scope in terms of building types (retail, offices, industrial, educational etc) and level of analysis.

BREEAM International, BREEAM Communities and BREEAM In-use are all valuable additions to the portfolio of tools for measuring sustainability within the building stock
and community.

It is vitally important that we do not just reward design intent but also measure how buildings perform in use and the impact they have on the community. It is useful to isolate the impact the building has on a community in terms of its effect on ecology, transport and climate change from the health and wellbeing within the building space.

As building services engineers, our sustainable contributions are in areas such
as the innovative design and application of boilers, chillers, ducting, energy, water usage and wiring. But, in our quest for low natural resource usage, we mustn't ignore that all
our buildings have indirect as well as direct impacts.

Buildings don't just affect those who use them, but also those who live and work around them - from the general public to small businesses, local authorities, police and health services.
Street cleaners, binmen, traffic wardens, all are affected by buildings and nobody should be left out when designing new or extensions to old buildings.

We should be conscious that as engineers we have a duty of care for the environment and communities. And that extends far beyond the hardware - we mustn't be blinkered, concentrating on our bit of the process alone. As well as sustainable services, we should be promoting:

li Green travel plans for our projects, taking particular interest in the type of project,
such as schools and walking buses and cycle-to-work schemes

li IT Infrastructure including video conferencing to save on travelling to meetings around the country and across the world and also promoting home working

lil Waste segregation in our building - nobody should be throwing out thousands of plastic cups, aluminium cans or glass bottles to landfill.

People and communities can be very apathetic about sustainability, but it is worth remembering the number one in the building engineer's mind is to maintain a healthy and comfortable environment. Sustainability does not come at the expense of a comfortable environment.