Inventing Alternatives

  Construction   Estimating   PM Network  

The country's roads, bridges and transit systems will see an investment shortfall of nearly US$850 billion by 2020, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2015 Infrastructure #GameChangers report. Inland waterways need US$13 billion through 2020, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and a 2015 U.S. Department of Energy report estimates that the cost of repairing and modernizing the country's power and energy network will reach tens of billions of U.S. dollars.

Where all this funding could come from is unclear. In the meantime, organizations are seeking more streamlined approaches to infrastructure projects. Project teams are testing and fine-tuning outside-the-box approaches before pursuing them on a larger scale.

In 2014, the water board in Washington, D.C., USA completed a US$470 million project to build a wastewater treatment plant that creates power from the solids left at the end of the water treatment process. The high-grade biosolid generated by the facility can be sold and reused in farms and city gardens. Before the project team could get full funding, though, it had to sell a key stakeholder group—the organization's board of directors—on the economic value of turning sewage into electricity.

The project team learned firsthand from European wastewater-treatment facilities that use the same thermal …

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