Richard Greenwood
Company: Jacobs
Job title: Principal Engineer – Water and Wastewater Infrastructure
Richard Greenwood
About Richard
I am based in Christchurch as a Principal Consulting Engineer in Jacobs in the Water Infrastructure team, but also responsible for business leadership and development across the water and industrial sectors.
I have a BE Chemical and Process Engineering Honors 1988 and am a CPEng and my competencies include leading business development and assisting clients with various solutions for their needs and their project requirements. I have a strong interest in community issues and assisting clients in sustainability and decarbonisation.
My experience includes all phases of design and development, project management and governance. Areas include the industrial, water and environmental sectors. In the environmental and water sectors I have been involved in a wide range of management, technical, stakeholder issues and supporting the work of teams developing large consenting projects, including challenging projects such as Lyttleton Wastewater, wastewater discharge to land and numerous other assignments for industry and local and regional councils.
In the industrial area, includes fertiliser, diary and primary aluminium smelting where I also spent time overseas in my early career.
My technical work areas in water include industrial water and wastewater, as well as wet scrubbing for odour, fluoride and other emissions.
Whakapapa pepeha
I am from Invercargill, Southland where I lived until 2008, and then moved the Christchurch. My wider family originates from the South Canterbury and Dunedin areas.
Strengths
I have worked for over 20 years in consulting and bring strength and depth of experience in the industry. I have very good strengths with working with our clients, and their issues, negotiating with them on contracts, our services, and how we communicate or services to them.
I have a strong ethical and values-based approach to the work we do as engineers, planners and scientists. I have skills in stakeholder engagement and management by bringing parties together and identifying strategies to build consensus and positive outcomes. Often our work doesn’t result in a strictly technically correct solution but needs to incorporate the different ideas, values and cultural viewpoints of the world we live in.
I have also been involved in the areas of mentoring and coaching our younger members of the profession. A key strength is recognising the future we have in the next generations of professionals we have and providing opportunities for them on projects, building responsibility early in their careers.
I also have strengths in building the importance of inclusion and diversity. I am consistently striving in my role to build a more diverse team, and see this as something we need to bring into the profession.
How would you support ACE New Zealand’s mahi in your region?
I am very keen to promote our profession and industry. I believe quite strongly that we are not as recognised for the value we bring to our society as other professional bodies do, and that we do not celebrate our successes enough. I would like to see ACE working to build more of our brand and presence in the local region.
I think attending various industry and client events, visiting member firms and interacting with office leads, professional engineering seniors /principals and obtaining their feedback on various issues will assist in supporting the mahi of ACE New Zealand in Canterbury.