Host Seth Scott interviews Andy Hill, Founder of Planet Price  Andy Hill is the Founder of Planet Price, a software company that incorporates the cost of planetary boundaries in infrastructure procurement. A mechanical engineer, Andy is also ANZ Director at Hemisphere Partners, an M&A firm. He serves on the board and is an angel investor and mentor for several startups.  Andy shows us how the so called externalities really account for 20-30% of a project's cost, how to find those costs, and how to reduce them.   

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S3E3 - Pricing for the Planet w/ Andy Hill

Host Seth Scott interviews Anthony Kane, President and CEO of Assistant Professor of Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure.   Anthony Kane is President & CEO of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit which facilitates the Envision Sustainable Infrastructure Framework. Anthony also serves as a commissioner on the DC Commission on Climate Change and Resiliency.  Envision is a rating system very similar to the IS Rating, and we often collaborate. IN this episode, we're exploring how the Envision sustainability rating works in countries as diverse as the US, Canada, Columbia, Guatemala, China, and even Ethiopia.  

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S3E2 - Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure w/ Anthony Kane

Host Seth Scott interviews Cailin Slattery, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. Cailin brings us her findings from the paper “State Capacity and Infrastructure Costs” (co-authored with Yale Law School Professor Zachary Liscow and Columbia University's William Nober). Key findings of the report:   

👉 One addtional transport employee per 1,000 residents is correlated with 26% lower costs at the project level.  

👉 Experience engineers and professionals in the upper 75th percentile are associate dwith 14% rductions in project-level costs. 

👉 A single high-quality engineer can save a project up to $750,000 a year 

👉 The departure of an experienced engineer can result in cost increases equal to six times their salary. This is equally true if they leave for retirement, the private sector, or an overseas position. 

👉 For all these reasons, proponents should be willing to pay up high-quality engineers up to $300,000 per year, well over twice the industry average, to reain that knowledge in house, in the pipeline, and available to the next generation of professionals.  

⭐ Links to some of the resources mentioned in the podcast:  "State Capacity and Infrastructure Costs": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4522676  

Yale Tobin Center for Economic Policy: "Experienced state employees can deliver big savings on infrastructure": https://tobin.yale.edu/research/experienced-state-employees-can-deliver-big-savings-infrastructure  

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S3E1 - State Capacity and Infrastructure Costs w/ Cailin Slattery

Host Seth Scott interviews Tania Hyde, Technical Director & Circular Design Lead (Transport & Infrastructure) at Beca. One of our most detailed episodes yet, Tania talks about Beca's Circular Design Framework, how infrastructure projects can achieve circular principles by asking tough questions, accounting for the Planet Price in purchasing, and free Circular Spatial Planning from TU Delft.   

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S2E7 - Beca's Circular Design Framework w/ Tania Hyde

During our interview with Lisa McLean, Managing Director and CEO of Circular Australia, we learned of some of the impressive circular initiatives happening in Australia, such as: 

- The importance of building circular "precincts", a place to keep resources in circulation locally. 

- The new ISO 59000 Global Framework for implementing circular economy principles 

- Several of Circular Australia's members doing amazing things, such as Allmould's collection of St. Vincent's Hospital's plastics waste to form new plastic blocks for use in the wind industry.  

Lisa is the Managing Director and CEO of Circular Australia, an independent peak body for circular economy innovation. She has successfully advised industry and governments to bring market change with new policy frameworks and regulations enabling the circular zero-carbon economy over the next 20 years. Formerly a political journalist, Lisa was also founder of the carbon accounting service Carbonwise and helped establish the Clinton Climate Initiative. Lisa is leading the transition to a zero-carbon circular economy in Australia.  

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S2E6 - Australia's Circular Economy w/ Lisa McLean

Today we're touring one of Waste Management's recovery centres in Auckland and meeting with Ingrid Cronin-Knight, Chief Growth and Sustainability Officer at Waste Management New Zealand. We talked to her about how to turn waste into gold.  

We learned a lot from our visit. Recycling isn't easy but when done right we can recover a good portion of our infrastructure materials, especially concrete, steel, gib, and timber. We also learned that the simple act of higher waste levies encourages more recycling and more emphasis on designing out waste. We need  more facilities like to take the load off landfills.   

Your impact at work far outweighs your impact as an individual. Not much of what you throw out of your home gets recycled. Even if you're sorting your food waste, green waste, glass, and plastics, the vast majority of what you throw out goes straight to landfill. That's what makes specifying recycling on infrastructure projects so important. Since concrete, steel and asphalt are the easiest to recycle, our work can make a massive impact.  

To learn more about Waste Management's construction waste recycling program, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZcK8CemEfU  

To learn more about Waste Management's work with Aliaxis Group to recycle plastic pipes, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4kV4kkwrM

S2E5 - Eliminating Waste w/ Ingrid Cronin-Knight

Guest Speaker Georgine Roodenrys is a respected leader in regenerative industrial development, with deep expertise in decarbonisation, circular economy, and climate strategy. She is a Director at Rennie, where she advises clients on navigating the complex transition to a low-carbon economy, integrating sustainability, innovation, and human progress.   

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S2E4 - Regenerate Nature w/ Georgine Roodenrys

Dr Nicole Garofano is an Australian leading expert in circular economy systems and sustainable materials management, recognised for her deep expertise in plastic waste and packaging value chains. She is currently the Head of Circular Economy Development at Planet Ark Environmental Foundation, where she works across industry, government, and research sectors to support the acceleration towards Australia’s transition to a circular economy. Nicole has over 20 years of experience in environmental education, waste management, international development, policy design, and circular economy. She holds a PhD from the University of Queensland focused on plastic packaging in island developing states. She has been a key voice in shaping national conversations on circular economy, and her work has advocated for systems-level change to improve design that embraces resource sufficiency and circular solutions.

S2E3 - What is Circular Economy w/ Nicole Garofano

This week on Infrastructure Connections we're talking to Veena Sahajwalla about micro recycling and the circular economy. The takeaways from this episode give us new ways to look at circularity:  

1. Companies are starting to re-think their identity. "We're not a waste company, we're a supply company." We supply resources as feedstock, resources that used to be waste for someone else.  

2. "If we zoom down to the micro recycling level, every material is important." If it was an important component of the original product, it will be important to recover for the next product.  

3. "Sustainability is a normal way to think. The more we can make it a norm, the more we can think of practical ways in which sustainability comes to life." 

4. We need to think of sustainability and recycling on a local level, specific to the local industries who need it, and make that recovery a priority. This is compared to the current method of sending our waste overseas and then buying it back as sources.   

Veena puts the re in resource.   

Veena is the Director of SMaRT Centre (Sustainable Materials Research & Technology) and Associate Dean (Strategic Industry Relations) faculty of Science, University of New South Wales.   

Her research interests include sustainability of materials and processes with emphasis on environmental benefits. She invented an environmentally friendly process for recycling plastics and rubber tyres in electric arc furnace steelmaking.   

She is an international award winning engineer. In 2012 she was named Overall Winner of the Australian Innovation Challenge Award. She was awarded the 2012 Banksia Award, the GE Eco Innovation Award and the 2005 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research.  

We hope you enjoy this episode. From now on we'll be releasing episodes on Thursdays fortnightly.   

👉 We'd love to hear your feedback, share your questions or comments below.  

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👉 Keep up to date with the Infrastructure Sustainability Council: Website: https://www.iscouncil.org/ LinkedIn:   / infrastructure-sustainability-council        

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S2E2 - Circular Innovation w/ Veena Sahajwalla

Welcome back to Infrastructure Connections, the podcast where we explore what makes sustainable infrastructure work, brought to you by the Infrastructure Sustainability Council. I'm your host, Seth Scott. And hooray! We made it into Season 2. 

This season we're exploring Circularity and the role it plays in infrastructure. What better way to start off than by looking at the circularity metrics of steel, a product that is virtually 100% recyclable. Nearly half of all steel is used in the infrastructure and construction industry, things like bridge beams and reinforcing bars and mesh, and much of the rest is used on what uses infrastructure, the planes, trains and automobiles. So today we'll be talking about steel with Steve Porter of Infrabuild.   

Steve is Head of Sustainability, Innovation & Trade at InfraBuild Australia, Australia's largest integrated manufacturer and supplier of steel long products. He's spent most of his career as a General Manager in the steel industry, and he is committed to shaping a sustainable, low-carbon future in energy intensive environments.   

We discuss circularity initiatives in the steel industry, initiatives like the Electric Arc Furnace which allows phenomenal recycling of scrap metal using renewable energy. We also look at how Material Circularity Indicators (MCI) can enhance EPDs for customers.  

For even more information, InfraBuild collaborated on the ISC Impact Notes on the Circular Economy, which you can find here: https://www.iscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Circular-Economy-Impact-Note_Final-for-Publication.pdf

S2E1 - Material Circularity Indicators w/ Steve Porter

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