Going Green: How to Incorporate Stakeholders' Values for Sustainability

Making decisions about large public works projects requires careful consideration of project objectives, criteria for meeting those objectives, and metrics for comparing alternatives. To successfully implement a project, the objectives and criteria must match the values and perspectives of stakeholders. Stakeholders and public interest groups are increasingly calling for sustainability to serve as a guiding principle for water and wastewater management decisions. For the San Francisco Sewer System Master Plan (SSMP), Carollo Engineers surveyed water and wastewater utilities to learn whether and how they incorporated sustainability into their planning processes, and conducted a literature review on sustainability indicators. This paper presents a summary of the survey and literature review, as well as a description of how that information is being integrated into the SSMP.