In developing mineral resources, the focus of project owners and key stakeholders is typically centred on the management of identified social and environmental impacts and compliance with regulatory requirements. Unfortunately, opportunities to protect and enhance the environment and communities are frequently overlooked, or not taken full advantage of. The most effective time to identify and respond to such opportunities is during a project’s planning and design phases.

The challenge, explains Ian Cawrse, a Senior Engineer and Sustainability Champion for SKM’s mining business, based in SKM’s Adelaide office, is to integrate sustainability considerations as an element of design decision making. This requires that the design criteria be technically sound, relevant to the project and applicable to desired design outcomes. This is particularly important for projects employing virtual teaming, where design engineers may be geographically dispersed and unlikely to be familiar with site specific sustainability challenges and opportunities.

One such project is BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam Expansion. Located 560 km north of Adelaide, South Australia, Olympic Dam is a multi-mineral orebody. It is the world’s largest uranium deposit, the fourth largest known copper deposit and the fourth largest known gold deposit. It also contains significant quantities of silver and is Australia’s largest underground mine.

BHP Billiton is planning a major expansion of Olympic Dam to more than triple its current production capacity by developing it into an open pit operation. In considering the new infrastructure required for the expansion, BHP Billiton recognises the importance and opportunities of including a decision making framework to aid engineers and program managers in addressing sustainability as a component of design criteria.

Within the mining industry, there is broad acceptance that proactively managing social and environmental risks provides long term benefits for a business, so risk management is central to the business case for integrating sustainability objectives in the design process.

The most effective risk control measure, hazard elimination, is often cheaper and more practical to achieve in the planning or design stage. For example, inherently safe plant and equipment is estimated to save between 5 and 10% of costs through reductions in inventories of hazardous materials, the reduced need for protective equipment and the reduced costs of equipment testing and maintenance.

From experience, Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM) has found that establishing sustainability as a design requirement early in the project lifecycle provides the best opportunity to shape a project to protect people, the community and the environment. Further into the design and delivery process, opportunities diminish and effort becomes more aligned to mitigating community and environmental impacts.

There are often design related lessons learned such as preventable pipeline spills, excess dust emissions and containable noise emissions during operations. Many of these impacts can be managed in the design process to avoid future mitigation costs, expensive remediation or retrofitting.

Sustainability as a major element in design criteria also seeks to:

• Provide design engineers with a decision making framework that allows them to approach problem solving as an holistic and integrated exercise with a long term perspective
• Operationalise corporate principles and policies into practical and meaningful decision making tools to facilitate design decisionsEngage a diversity of internal stakeholders including management, designers, operational teams and health, safety, environment and community (HSEC) practitioners in a process of dialogue
• Distil statutory requirements, corporate standards, lessons learned and leading industry practice into a single coherent framework that is easily understood by design engineers
• Be relevant to the development of design specifications on a facility/operations basis but also general enough to allow consistent application of sustainability principles across all components of a project (including mine, processing plant and ancillary infrastructure) 
• Support statutory compliance obligations where they can be best addressed through design decisions
• Improve performance and efficiency by reducing the need for retrofitting and remediation of facilities and equipment in the operations and decommissioning phase
• Where possible, capture cost savings through improved resource management, energy efficiency, spill prevention and other initiatives
• Address impacts which arise from multiple sources or across jurisdictions
• Be responsive to the needs and expectation of stakeholders during the design phase.

The role of the design engineer

Engineering design problems often have more than one solution and require resolution of multiple requirements arising from numerous areas – technological, environmental, health, safety, economic and social.

The role of the design engineer is to apply scientific and engineering knowledge to solving problems and then to evaluate solutions within the boundaries and constraints of these requirements. Design engineers produce drawings, specifications and other information necessary to effectively implement design solutions. The design process begins with the definition of requirements, which necessarily entails a process of data and information collection.

It is at this stage that sustainability objectives should be established as general guidelines or design criteria to allow them to be considered on a problem-specific basis and factored into the development of alternatives, the analysis of opportunities and risk and other decision-making processes.

A framework, not a prescriptive solution

A team comprising BHP Billiton and SKM sustainability practitioners was assembled to facilitate implementation of BHP Billiton’s corporate environmental and social responsibility policies at the project level by integrating sustainability into the established engineering process through design criteria.

The resulting document, Sustainability in Design Criteria, is intended to assist design engineers working on the project to systematically consider environmental and community impacts throughout the design process. It provides a framework for integrating sustainable development considerations into design rather than prescribing specific performance indicators against which to measure designs.

Design criteria inputs

A key requirement of the Sustainability in Design Criteria document is that it provides design engineers with the guidelines and information necessary to evaluate design alternatives consistent with the BHP Billiton corporate sustainability framework and statutory obligations.

A knowledge creation approach was taken in formulating criteria, recognising that interplay of codified knowledge captured in policies, procedures and guidelines and the tacit knowledge of practitioners with site experience is needed to effectively create, store and apply knowledge to advance sustainable design practices and improved organisational performance. Inputs included BHP Billiton’s corporate policies, statutory obligations, leading industry practice and lessons learned.

1. Design process

As previously described, engineering design is an iterative process and risk assessments, audits and project reviews are carried out, from which lessons learned are derived and risk registers updated.

2. Statutory requirements

Planned facilities fall within the jurisdiction of the Australian, South Australian and Northern Territory governments. An integrated project approval process required an EIS which provided the contextual information for the proposed expansion and a detailed analysis of its potential impacts. The Sustainability in Design Criteria document incorporates this context information to inform geographically dispersed design engineers who may not be familiar with the project’s statutory and environmental obligations.

3. Corporate policy framework

Sustainability in Design Criteria provides a foundation to move beyond compliance and towards implementing a positive and proactive approach to sustainability underpinned and strengthened by BHP Billiton’s corporate values and commitment to corporate social and environmental responsibility. The key sustainability objectives and approaches described in BHP Billiton policies were used to guide the overall philosophy behind the design criteria.

4. Leading industry practice

Examples of leading industry practice were sought from experienced SKM and BHP Billiton practitioners and drawn from published leading industry practice documents, including Australian Standards.

5. Lessons learned

A strategy to harness existing knowledge was employed by engaging the Olympic Dam team in a workshop to derive lessons from their site and broader project experiences. The team was challenged to critically reflect on underlying design principles and assumptions rather than corrective actions.

The general principles derived from lessons learned were captured and embedded in design criteria and where possible, figures, diagrams and photos were used to illustrate the consequences of good and poor design.

Design criteria validation

The methodology for developing the Sustainability in Design framework and design criteria required validation with multiple stakeholders, including sustainability practitioners and engineers, to ensure its relevance and applicability to practical design challenges. The process of developing the document itself modelled the collaborative behaviours necessary to apply it, strengthening the social capital of the project team by fostering greater dialogue and developing relationships across disciplines. The collaborative approach to engaging stakeholders also served to promote acceptance of the framework.

The Olympic Dam Sustainability in Design Criteria document is a good example of the benefits of proactively incorporating sustainability early in a project’s design phase. Such a document should not act as a ‘one-stop-shop’ prescriptive solution to sustainability issues, but instead it can promote further investigation and consideration of key sustainability issues. It can also encourage and support effective dialogue between design engineers, sustainability practitioners and other key stakeholders. For BHP Billiton it is playing an important role for the project to create sustainable value for shareholders, employees, contractors, suppliers, customers, business partners and host communities.