Midwestern Consulting

Self Healing Concrete

This living-organism-assisted “bioconcrete” could transform the way cities are built, according to The Delft University of Technology’s Centre for Materials.  The main benefit is a huge reduction in maintenance costs, along with the aesthetics and safety aspects of surfaces that are always in good condition.

Bioconcrete includes a paste of tiny organisms called Bacillus that produce calcite. That hard mineral then fills the little cracks that would otherwise let water into the concrete and ultimately produce cracking and rusting of reinforcement.  

However, all of God’s Bacillus have got to eat and that has been the trick:  providing food for the Bacillus.  This is done with tiny capsules of  calcium lactate (from milk) as part of the mix.

Saline River at Mill Pond Park

In late April, City of Saline, Michigan dignitaries re-dedicated a newly built bridge over the Saline River in the city’s Mill Pond Park.  The Bowley Bridge and surrounding river bank had been damaged during a recent flood.  Midwestern Consulting was asked to provide design and construction project  management for new plantings, soil erosion control and a new steel structure. The re-dedication ceremony celebrated the opening of the new bridge and its heritage.

Midwestern Consulting was the lead consulting engineer for the bridge replacement and bank stabilization project.  The project consisted of removal of the original Bowley Bridge and replacement with ADA approach ramps as well as 100 feet of stream stabilization/restoration. The City provided the conceptual design and selected what materials to use.  Midwestern Consulting provided engineering design of the shoreline improvements and approach ramps. Highlights of the project include the use of Rosetta Stone block and Envirolok vegetated sandbags (both used along the stream banks) and creation of a flat, easy access area to the water’s edge for kids.

Photo courtesy of SalinePatch

Soil is a key element of our ecosystem

Matt Power, Editor-In-Chief of Green Builder Magazinewrites in the March 2012 issue about how typical construction practices destroy soil ecosystems during development of new buildings.  Stripping and mass grading, “attack(ing) a piece of land the way a three-year-old goes after a lump of Play-Doh”, typically divides the soil into one pile for topsoil, one pile for subsoil and one pile for sand.  “Abused, misunderstood, poisoned and taken for granted, soils deserve better. They’re essential to life, more complex than you can imagine, and in serious need of stewardship”, Power writes.  And soil ecosystems are very difficult to restore.

Power summarizes soil expert Mark Fulford’s message that “modern society- agriculture in particular- has gone astray.”  Industrial agriculture following WW II is based on mining rather than biology, with the result that crops are “grown in a chemical soup” instead of in soils. 

Typical construction site management reflects the same attitude toward the soil.  Rip it up, pile it up, spread it out, compact it, re-spread soils and top it with turf treated with petroleum based nitrogen. Fulford calls that “carpeting a collapsed ecosystem.” His point is that there is no way to effectively restore the soils that natural processes produce in human terms at an extremely slow rate, at the rate of up to one inch per one thousand years. There is also no way to restore the amount of air in the soil that the roots need to thrive.   

The best way to protect soil ecosystems is to disturb them as little as possible.  A few key points taken from “Sustainable Landscape Construction” by J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig with a few added comments include:

• Preserve and protect every tree (not usually feasible, so minimize removals)
• Use moveable, pervious pavers (or permeable paving)
• Minimize utility access damage (and think about what kind of backfill material makes sense)
• Plan staging carefully (minimize the limits of disturbance)
• Listen to the weeds.  This refers to “Weeds and Why They Grow”, a classic 116 page guide by Jay McCaman published in 1994.  By reading that, you get a free and quite accurate picture of the real qualities of the soil on a particular site. The idea is that observing which weeds grow where is a highly efficient way of identifying what the soils are lacking.

If soils have to be disturbed, the goals of restoration should include increasing carbon and air content.  Fulford says that increasing soil organic carbon can “sequester enough carbon to get us back to the pre-industrial level…”

Our understanding of soil ecology has evolved but our typical construction practices have not.

Midwestern Consulting provided civil engineering services for the Ann Arbor underground garage currently being constructed next to the District Library at Fifth and William in downtown Ann Arbor.

We saw this recent article in  AnnArbor.com and thought the green credentials it has earned was very important.

“The DDA has worked throughout his project to minimize its environmental impacts,” Amber Miller, the DDA’s planning and research specialist, wrote in an email to AnnArbor.com. “Our efforts now allow this structure to become part of this unique program designed to encourage the standardization of sustainable initiatives within the parking industry.”

From the top floor of the Ann Arbor District Library, the view of the new downtown underground parking structure taking shape on Thursday Photo by Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com

The Green Parking Council is a nonprofit group dedicated to expanding green parking practices through its Green Garage rating system. It developed the Demonstrator Site program as an evaluative tool to initiate the process toward Green Garage certification.”The GPC has created the Demonstrator Site program to bring recognition to those facilities that have committed to making an effort towards sustainability and who have made progress towards this end,” the group’s website states.

Miller cited several examples of the project’s commitment to sustainable practices. For instance, the excavated sand from the site is being reused as part of the structural concrete for the project, and all demolished concrete, asphalt and wood from the site has been recycled.

Also, all of the stormwater that falls on the site will be detained, in excess of city requirements, and energy-saving lights will be used that can cast lower light levels in off-peak periods.

When the structure opens, it’s expected to include 22 electric car charging stations and set aside prime parking spaces for alternative fueled vehicles.

DDA officials said this represents only the latest in a number of DDA initiatives to promote sustainability as a part of downtown development.

The DDA also has committed nearly $500,000 toward a program providing energy saving audits, recommendations and installation rebates to downtown businesses. DDA officials said the program has encouraged downtown building owners to make nearly $700,000 worth of improvements that are anticipated to save $87,000 a year in energy costs.

The DDA also has played a role in alternative transportation programs by covering 95 percent of the cost for the popular go!pass — a free bus pass for 7,100 employees — as well as bike hoops and lockers, commuter rail research, Zipcar sponsorship, and the getDowntown program. Additionally, the DDA provided the funds for the installation of a solar-electric demonstration project at the Farmers Market, downtown LED street lights, energy efficient upgrades at the Delonis Center and downtown sidewalk recycling containers.