The Anderson Road Quarry used to be barren land at the urban fringe.  The Hong Kong Housing Authority introduced a series of sustainability initiatives on social, environmental and economic aspects to foster the vision of building a sustainable city and community which is inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable to transform it into a sustainable housing precinct in a new urban fabric.

Social Sustainability is an integral part of this project.  We engaged local communities and the public via public engagement workshops since its inception. Local needs and community aspirations so collected laying the foundation for the planning and design of the project, coupling with the universal design approach to make it more inclusive. We also engaged local students, teachers and artists to upcycle the donated quarry machineries into the estate art pieces featuring the interesting history of the quarry, creating the estate identity as well as the sense of belonging for the residents.

Economical Sustainability is achieved by adopting an economically viable and cost-effective approach. We designed the typical floor with a precast rate of about 90% on plan to enhance buildability and cost-effectiveness.  We adopted the Integrated Procurement Approach (IPA), a combined building and foundation contract procured under a three-envelope tendering system considering price, technical as well as innovation aspects.  Besides integrating builders’ and designers’ expertise at early design and construction stages which resulted in a saving of HK$7.7M by optimization of foundation design, IPA also engaged the exploration of sustainable and innovative ideas.  5D BIM application, i.e. 3D BIM with additional time and cost dimensions, was explored as an innovative item and proved to be an effective construction management tool.  We successfully utilized 5D BIM to forecast the extent of delay due to the unforeseen obstructions at site access points and to mitigate a delay of two months by better planning of resources.

Environmental Sustainability is materialized by significant reduction of consumption of resources.  With effective energy saving measures, the energy consumption of communal services per flat is significantly lower than the private housing’s. Over 50% in concrete volume of the typical floors were prefabricated off site, saving nearly 7 000 trees with less in-situ formworks and reducing 70% of construction wastage.   On-site Concrete Batching Plant reduced gas emission of the concrete mixer trucks during delivery, saving 25 000 tons of concrete waste and reducing 134.8 tons of carbon footprint.  We incorporated the W-trap configuration in the drainage system to avoid backflow of foul air in order to make our buildings more resilient to the spread of air-borne diseases through the drainage system.  Pilot application of Zero Irrigation System on tree planting achieved water-saving of 2.3 million litres annually in a 1 500m² planting area.