Motor vehicles, industry and fossil fuel burning power plants are readily acknowledged as major culprits contributing to climate change, but many people are surprised to learn that the global buildings and property sector is responsible for generating about 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Buildings rely heavily on fossil fuel generated energy to regulate internal comfort levels – air is warmed and cooled, then discarded and building envelopes are regularly designed to building codes with little effort to achieve better than minimum standards of solar control or heat losses.

By adopting a sustainable approach to the design of fit-outs and refurbishments, there are great opportunities to reduce the emissions and energy consumption from existing buildings to complement the increasing uptake in sustainable design for new building stock.

Existing buildings – essential opportunities

It is extremely important to maintain focus on the opportunities for existing buildings to become more sustainable because efficiencies introduced into the built environment could deliver over two billion tonnes CO₂ or about three times the amount scheduled to be reduced under the Kyoto protocol.¹

Existing buildings are therefore an essential element in the global assault on kicking the carbon habit:

• The construction of sustainable new buildings will represent only a small portion of the entire building stock and alone
  will not have the required impact to successfully address global warming.
• Globally, most new buildings are still constructed without significant sustainable design attributes.
• Existing buildings (particularly commercial buildings and social infrastructure) typically undergo periodic upgrading and refurbishments, providing scope to adopt sustainable design elements within existing cycles.

As building occupiers increasingly demand greener buildings, prudent building owners and managers will need to respond to protect their return on investment, or risk not being able to attract and retain premium tenants, enhance their property value and brand, avoid high tenant turnover and reduce the potential for obsolescence.

Building owners and operators also need to be aware that governments are signalling the imposition of broad-scale sustainable building legislation and regulation, e.g. the Australian Government has accepted a recommendation from its 2020 Strategic Summit for all buildings to be carbon neutral after 2020. Already, the Australian Government’s Energy Efficiency in Government Operations (EEGO) has nominated 2011 as the target to reduce the energy intensity for tenant light and power by 25% and for central services by 20%.

The Way Forward

Kicking the carbon habit from fossil-fuel generated mainstream power in favour of renewable sources society is still decades away, but decades of wasted opportunity is a luxury that the planet simply does not have.

While the primary focus must be on energy efficiency, a major hurdle for existing buildings is the challenge to upgrade ventilation and air conditioning systems due to constraints of building structures and space. Lighting and other energy usage however, does provide significant opportunities.

SKM played a leading role in providing ESD services for Sustainability Victoria’s new office fitout in the Melbourne CBD. This fit-out is intended to be a demonstration of best practice sustainable office fit-outs and is targeting a 6 Star Green Star Office Interiors Rating and a 5 Star Tenancy Australia Building Greenhouse Rating (ABGR).

Sustainability Victoria’s offices now consume 40% less energy, produce less carbon emissions and provide improved indoor environment quality, yet were completed for equivalent cost of a standard commercial fit-out. Careful waste management during fit-out construction and office relocation also saw many items reused or recycled, with waste to landfill reduced to less than 5% by volume and 87% of construction waste by weight being recycled.

The success of the Sustainability Victoria project confirms the possibilities in realising exceptional sustainable outcomes, where building designers and constructors can respond strongly with an integrated design approach that ensures the right outcome without a dramatic change in overall design or capital cost.

Sustainable design also acknowledges innovation and the future potential of a building. The design process must be cognisant of new technologies, even when they are not applied in the initial capital works and their future inclusion should not be prevented through lack of consideration.

Lighting and energy

Modifying existing buildings does not necessarily require a complete overhaul, but can be made with small, incremental changes. These can include the installation of light and movement sensors to avoid excess energy use and applying insulating film to exterior facades to reduce the load.

In fact, smart approaches to the overhaul of office systems such as the application of newer and more powerful blade computer servers that reduce the need for large air conditioning systems and therefore deliver energy and cost savings. Significant energy savings can also be achieved through the use of laptop computers, which use approximately one-fifth of the energy of desktops.

In the Sustainability Victoria project, further annual energy reductions of up to 2.45MWh/yr are being achieved with an automatic master switch that controls all non-essential equipment (e.g. computers, desk lamps, printers and copiers) during out-of-office hours. A zoned manual override switch is also provided to accommodate occasional out-of-office hour use.

The key factor is a coordinated examination of each element of a building and the services to identify what can be improved and the cost benefit of implementing those actions.

Materials

The traditional notion that natural materials are more environmentally friendly than man-made products is a thing of the past. The science of life cycle analysis measures all the energy used to procure, manufacture, transport and recycle materials and provides a complete understanding of the comparative impact of material choices.

A notable aspect of the fit-out is the ‘think tank’, with curved walls constructed from recycled cardboard where people can gather away from their desks to throw ideas around, have a coffee break, chat, or play music. Workstations designed for disassembly and return to the manufacturer for recycling and/or reuse when no longer required, also contributed to the fit-out achieving the maximum points in the Green Star Office Interiors Workstation calculator.

Transport

The holistic nature of successful sustainable building design also considers how building occupants will interact with the immediate vicinity and community of the building; and how they will access and travel to and from it. This includes the ease of accessing public transport and the incorporation of bike storage and other facilities to encourage commuting in healthier, more sustainable ways.

Having exceeded mandated office accommodation guidelines designed to achieve environmentally, socially and economically sustainable workplaces, the Sustainability Victoria office fit-out is delivering ongoing operational cost savings, workplace satisfaction and productivity gains.

Achieving successful sustainable building outcomes does not require a radically different approach to building design and construction. The potential for building occupiers and owners to take advantage of benefits in sustainable buildings lies in an approach that explores all options and opportunities for energy efficiency, user amenity, building flexibility and functionally - versus more traditional approaches that often assume a one specification for all methodology.

Significant opportunities exist to improve the green credentials of existing buildings with the application of sustainable design solutions that not only deliver reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduced energy usage for ongoing operational cost savings and a more productive and healthy interior environment.

[1] Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities, Sustainable Construction and Building Initiative, March 2007, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

© Sinclair Knight Merz
Requests to re-publish achieve articles should be made via information@globalskm.com
For copyright and disclaimer notices, see Terms of Use.