January/February 2025 - 56

CHAIR GERALD VERBEEK
Sustainability
During 2024, the Sustainability Committee
continued to meet monthly (on the
last Tuesday of each month at 11:00 a.m.
ET) to work on tools the industry can use to provide more
sustainable foundations. These tools include Sustainability
Guides, the EFFC/DFI Carbon Calculator and a Sustainability
Flowchart, and these three tools were also the topic of one of
the webinars the committee organized in 2024.
The work on the Sustainability Guides is done in
cooperation with the European Federation of Foundation
Contractors (EFFC) and with Kimberly Martin, Ph.D., P.E., ENV
SP, Keller, leading this effort from DFI. By the time this report
is published the Carbon Reduction and Circular Economy
guides should have been published, available on both the
EFFC and DFI websites. The third guide, water, has been
drafted and is currently under review, while the fourth guide,
adaptation and resiliency, is nearly ready for review. Both
guides should be published in the course of 2025. For each of
these guides, a specific work group was formed, and the
committee is actively seeking somebody to lead the guide on
wellbeing. In addition, Martin can always use help from
anybody interested in developing a guide on one of the 17
Sustainable Development Goals not yet covered.
The work on the EFFC/DFI Carbon Calculator is led on the
DFI side by Chris Nelsen, P.E., Delve Underground. In 2024 the
task group focused on defining plans to transform the tool,
which is currently an Excel spreadsheet that can be downloaded
for free at
www.geotechnicalcarboncalculator.com, into
a web-based tool. The outcome was captured in a request for
proposals that was issued in October of 2024 to various
companies. The quotation is expected back during the first
quarter and the actual work is then scheduled to begin during
CHAIR EMMA MIGNEAULT
Women in Deep Foundations (WiDF)
The Women in Deep Foundations
Committee (WiDF) has embraced the
phrase " teamwork makes the dream
work " this year! The committee has kept busy with
continuing initiatives, new efforts and celebrating the
10-year anniversary of the group! The most recent initiatives
include:
Focus on Safety with PPE for Women: A presentation on Fit
Your Frame from Kelsey Rombouts, Tony Gee and Partners,
detailed how construction services company Ellis Don
worked with a personal protective equipment (PPE) supplier
to develop gear that was a correct fit for women on its team.
56 * DEEP FOUNDATIONS * JAN/FEB 2025
Gear that Fits Right, a joint committee meeting with WiDF
and the National Association of Women in Construction,
discussed PPE for women and the current and future state of
women in leadership roles within the industry.
She Knows the Drill, a workshop at the International
Foundations Congress and Equipment Expo in May 2024,
was designed to empower women of all experience levels to
understand foundation installation equipment, such as the
capacities, sizes and uses. Planning and execution of the
workshop included Jewels Stover, Bauer Equipment; Sue
Frank, TEI Rock Drills; Alissa Maxwell Weiss, Hub Foundations;
Pollyanna Cunningham, International Construction
the second quarter, with a release of a beta version toward the
end of 2025. With this upgrade the 10-year-old tool will be even
more efficient in helping engineers and contractors alike to
assess the carbon footprint of foundation designs.
The third tool that was developed is the Sustainability
Flowchart, an effort spearheaded by Will Haasz, EIT, Menard.
This flowchart depicts how all project stakeholders can
ensure that a foundation project is more sustainable. Besides
presenting this during the webinar, Haasz is also in the
process of writing an article on the flowchart for publication
in DFI's magazine in early 2025.
Apart from these three tools, efforts on energy foundations
must be mentioned as well. The committee has a task force
dealing with that topic, which is headed by Tony Amis,
Endurant Energy, and both he and Hursit Ibuk, Dr.-Ing., Bauer
Spezialtiefbau, presented during the committee's second
webinar in 2024. Amis has been very active in developing a
guide on energy foundations for the International Ground
Source Heat Pump Association. Once that document has been
released, which is expected around April, a similar guide will
be issued as a DFI document.
Finally, the committee's efforts to collaborate with other
organizations should be mentioned. In the area of
sustainability there is much to do, and the committee is not
only working together with EFFC, as highlighted above, but
also with the sustainability committees of the Geo-Institute
and the Canadian Geotechnical Society. With these two
organizations there are regular joint meetings to keep
everybody informed of the ongoing activities.
All these activities will continue in 2025, and we would
welcome any DFI member that is interested in sustainability
to attend our monthly meetings to become more involved.
http://www.geotechnicalcarboncalculator.com
January/February 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of January/February 2025
