The Nutrient Management Facility, owned by Alexandria Renew Enterprises (AlexRenew), recently earned the first Envision Platinum certification from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) in the Washington, DC, metro region. The Envision rating system provides a holistic framework for evaluating and rating the environmental, community, and economic benefits of large infrastructure projects that incorporate sustainability throughout the project life cycle. The facility received high scores in Envision’s comprehensive set of criteria in five categories: quality of life, leadership, resource allocation, natural world, and climate and risk.
The AlexRenew Nutrient Management Facility, an 18-million-gallon storage facility topped with a public athletic field, stores wastewater during nutrient peaks to balance the amount of nitrogen that goes into biological treatment processes. The Nutrient Management Facility is the largest project under AlexRenew’s $160-million state-of-the-art Nitrogen Upgrade Program, the utility’s response to regulations limiting the amount of nutrients water resource recovery facilities can release into the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
CH2M led master planning and design, provided engineering services during construction, and helped incorporate sustainability throughout AlexRenew’s entire nitrogen upgrade program. It is CH2M’s first Envision-certified project.
“CH2M has been pleased to support AlexRenew on this important project,” said Dan Lynch, CH2M principal. “The project execution required extraordinary vision on the part of AlexRenew, as well as a commitment to the principles of sustainability and involvement with the community. These are principles that CH2M shares with AlexRenew, and that is what has made this project so rewarding for everyone involved.”
“This was only the second CH2M project designed with an integrated sustainability component from start to finish. The team embraced the challenge and demonstrated a willingness to break out of business-as-usual approaches, transforming the project into a win-win for all stakeholders,” said Rich Voigt, CH2M’s program manager.