Engineering firm focuses on sustainable development

As an engineer, Allen Ward likes to solve problems.

He saw one in the early 1990s while flying from Atlanta for an environmental consulting assignment.

Seeing cars snaking along the city's highways, he said, cemented his commitment to encouraging sustainable development.

"There's a better way to build community," he thought. "It just seemed like there's a better way."

Ward carried that commitment through his work as a textile consultant in India in the late 1990s before he and wetland scientist Berry Edwards bought Connor & Associates, an

11-year-old civil engineering and land surveying firm in Bluffton, in 2000.

Now known as Ward Edwards, the firm is turning 20.

The company, its green and white signs seen along roadsides throughout the area, exploded in size as growth enveloped Hilton Head Island and extended to the mainland.

Business was expanding so quickly the company was buying a new design workstation every month.

The recession has slowed that pace, and the company has downsized. But Ward said his commitment to

innovative thinking hasn't wavered.

"The one sort of shining light in that has been that commitment to a new way," Ward said.

Ward cited its design of a system to treat and redistribute wastewater at Tradition Hilton Head and its two-year-old grant program for

nonprofits.

The company, which also has

offices in Port Royal and Pooler, Ga., has broadened its geographic reach and is focusing more on municipal jobs to cope with the downturn, Ward said. Municipalities generally are readily adapting to the notion that the earth's resources are finite, Ward said. He

likened that transition in mindset to the one humans made from hunting and gathering to farming.

It's not always easy for business

people to recognize nature's limits, Ward said, but he prefers to design projects that can achieve that.

"If you're willing to look for them, there tends to be a right answer," he said.