Across the world, infrastructure engineers and contractors are rethinking how projects are planned, built, and reimagined. There are so many macro factors impacting the built environment—from climate pressures, to growing urbanization, to new community expectations, and to the need for greater sustainability. We are seeing the rise of new projects, new technologies, and new methods for bringing smarter, more sustainable infrastructure to market.
One recent example is GeoStruXer’s seismic rehabilitation initiative in Saudi Arabia, which uses a sustainable micropiled PTRaft system to stabilize creeping ground. While this project was recognized through the Bentley-Envision Award for Sustainable Infrastructure from Bentley Systems, its significance extends beyond accolades. It reflects several larger industry trends that are pushing sustainability from an optional consideration to a core design driver.
Let’s unpack this for a couple of minutes, but first, a few details about the awards program. All Bentley-Envision submissions were reviewed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, the nonprofit organization that develops and manages the Envision sustainable infrastructure framework, in partnership with Bentley’s Sustainability team.
“So, this is an award where we partnered with ISI,” says Chris Bradshaw, chief sustainability and education officer, Bentley Systems. “ISI is a nonprofit organization that have a sustainability framework. They have an Envision framework that they come and assess a project. This year, on the Bentley side, we looked at Going Digital awards submissions, and we assessed them from a sustainability standpoint based on the information provided. That created a list of projects, and we winnowed it down to a handful we passed to ISI and ISI conducted the assessment of the finalist projects. So, Bentley didn’t make the selection; ISI made the selection.”
Bentley-Envision Award for Sustainable Infrastructure is new this year. Bradshaw adds part of the sustainability mission at Bentley Systems is to promote and advocate for infrastructure projects that do take a sustainability angle. “When we see projects that embrace sustainability, we try to highlight them and showcase them,” says Bradshaw.
In fact, the GeoStruXer team didn’t even know it was up for this particular award. What the GeoStruXer team did know was it was it had found a solution to building on tough soil in the Middle East.
That team is made up of a husband and wife. A geotechnical engineer, Hamzah M. B. Al-Hashemi is the CEO and technical director of GeoStruXer, a company he co-founded in 2023 with his spouse, Dana Al-Faleyleh, a structural engineer.
The warehouse project in port city of Jazan, on the Red Sea, belongs to a government entity and is a grain warehouse storage, built in 2014, as part of the food security plan, and saves 1.5 million people in that region. A few years later, they noticed some cracks, deformation, and deterioration in the structure of the warehouse.
The couple set out to uncover what the ground was hiding—and then, using Bentley Systems’ software solutions, designed a warehouse rehabilitation plan so efficient and environmentally sensitive that it went on to win the Bentley Envision Award.
“We are not embracing technology for the sake of technology. We want to achieve something from this technology,” says Hamzah M. B. Al-Hashemi, GeoStruXer.
Al-Hashemi adds, “The ultimate goal for companies applying for these kinds of awards is what they are trying to achieve, what impact they want to leave, and what exemplary projects they want to provide for others to follow. That was our goal from the beginning. We are trying to reduce the cost for our client, to provide value engineering, to reduce the carbon footprint, to provide resilient designs in terms of climate change impact, etc.”
Again, this points to bigger trends taking place in infrastructure today. Experts are targeting how to reduce resource consumption, predict long-term performance, document sustainability performance, build more sustainable structures, you name it! Different projects have different sustainability targets and needs. But the solution is almost always the same: determine how to build better with AI (artificial intelligence), digital twins, and other new, emerging technologies. True innovation lies at the heart of all of it.
Resilience is no longer optional. Resilience is key to ensuring we build infrastructure of tomorrow all around the world. And sustainability and innovation are intertwined, as organizations search for new ways to build. GeoStruXer is simply one example of innovation at work in infrastructure.
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