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Video: Don’t talk about sustainability, talk about innovation

People are becoming over saturated with the word “sustainability” according to Lend Lease head of sustainability Jon Kirkpatrick. It is time instead, he says, for the industry to focus on innovation and creating positive social and business benefits

In an interview recorded at the recent ACE annual conference Kirkpatrick highlighted the need for professionals to stand back and understand the outcomes that they were trying to achieve through the on-going focus on sustainable design.

“You talk about sustainability but you stop talking about the outcomes. For me the issue is what you are trying to achieve through sustainability."

“It is very easy for the word to generate visions of environmentalism and people then either engage because they understand it or the switch off because they don’t want to understand it,” he says in the interview with Infrastructure Intelligence editor Antony Oliver.

“Either way you get out into a box and it becomes very hard to have the real conversation about what needs to happen on a project,” he adds “You talk about sustainability but you stop talking about the outcomes. For me the issue is what you are trying to achieve through sustainability. At Lend Lease we mean so not more than green – we mean real innovation and understanding what it means to us as a business.”

Kirkpatrick uses his firm’s on-going project to redevelop London’s Elephant & Castle region as an example of how to really embed innovation into the design and construction process to drive a more liveability into infrastructure designs.

“It is recognising that through talking about energy efficiency we have missed the bigger picture,” he says. “The bigger picture is about people as the end user – how do you want to live your life? If we don’t then we miss the mark”

If you would like to contact Antony Oliver about this, or any other story, please email antony.oliver@infrastructure-intelligence.com.