Tools for the sustainability trade – spotlight on environmental assessment systems

BREEAM may be the go-to tool for understanding and rating the environmental impact of a construction project in the UK, but there are other tools and systems available. Get Sust gives an overview of the systems and their uses that have made the headlines in 2011.

Launched way back in 1990, BREEAM is a well-established and widely used professional environmental assessment system that has certified some 200,000 buildings over the past 20 years. With its clear structure and relatively transparent scoring system, it is credited with driving forward the overall improvement in the sustainability of buildings.

Over the years BREEAM grew into a suite of tools catering for a wide range of building types – offices, healthcare, schools and so on – but the 2011 incarnation has gone back to basics with a single approach that can be tailored for the circumstances of the building being reviewed. Now known as BREEAM New Construction 2011 (BREEAM 2011), the scheme's aim is "to mitigate the life cycle impacts of new buildings on the environment in a robust and cost-effective manner"; the key point being that it is used to assess the overall performance of the building, rather than specific features of it (envelope, building services etc). The package now covers both the design and the post-construction stages, and encompasses 49 individual assessment issues spanning nine environmental categories with a tenth category for 'innovation'. There is also a BREEAM Refurbishment under development and due for release in 2012.

The requirement for post-construction assessment dates back to the BREEAM 2008 scheme. In the 2011 version, this has been taken a step further in that any building achieving a score of 'Excellent' or 'Outstanding'(85%) is required to enter into a system of on-going monitoring in order to hold on to this certification status, and case studies of these 'best in class' buildings will be developed and published on the scheme website. The monitoring is achieved through the BREEAM In Use Assets scheme, which operates along similar lines to the main BREEAM, but includes an online pre-assessment tool for building owners/occupiers to use before the official auditor pays a call.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the BREEAM system, deciding that a project should aim for BREEAM certification is a considerable undertaking due to the time and cost implications, but it is one that many clients, particularly public bodies, regard as essential, while gaining a BREEAM 'excellent' score is undoubtedly a marketing plus.

It has certainly paid off for Willmott Dixon, whose Primary Care Centre in Houghton-le-Spring, Sunderland, achieved an 'Outstanding' rating at the post-construction stage last month (October 2011). All parties involved have gained considerable publicity from the achievement; and the environment should, all being well, gain to the tune of a 33% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. The Primary Care Centre includes virtually a full complement of renewable technologies (solar thermal, photovoltaics, wind turbine, ground-source heat pump, plug-in points for electric vehicles and rainwater harvesting), but it has also addressed the need to reduce potential heating and cooling loads by adopting a novel form of natural ventilation – a considerable challenge for a healthcare building where infection control is paramount. Developed by Breathing Buildings, the ventilation system relies on a 1 m wide 'thermal wall' which allows cool outside air to enter high up in the building. R&D Engineer Stephen Livermore has written an informative blog post which explains the system and there is a useful factsheet on the Breathing Buildings website. Crucially, though, Livermore mentions the advantage of having been invited to participate in the building design from an early stage – always a good idea if sustainability is high on the agenda, and one of the factors that is helped by taking the BREEAM approach.

The downside of BREEAM, however, is that it is a very 'formal' system with external assessors and less opportunity for testing and debating design options.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has the capability of offering more 'in-flight testing' or scenarios, but that requires either specialist consultants or a considerable investment. So what are the other, lower-cost options for environmental assessment?

The UK Green Building Council has compiled a useful list of options, including short descriptions and contact details for systems including:

• The Design Quality Indicator (DQI) developed by the Construction Industry Council
• The SE checklist developed by SEEDA and BRE
• SMARTwaste, an indicator-based system developed by BRE.

Non-UK systems including LEED (US) and GreenStar (Australia) are also listed.

Not on the list are other, proprietary, systems such as Arup's SPeAR (Sustainable Project Appraisal Routine), and CarbonLite developed by AECB (the Sustainable Building Association) which is suitable for both domestic and small non-domestic projects; nor are some of the assessment schemes that deal with both the very early and post-completion project phases.

GreenPrint, for instance, is a tool developed by BRE in 2008 to give an independent assessment of masterplans. Using this tool, plans are assessed in terms of eight categories – climate change, resources, transport, ecology, business, community, placemaking and buildings. It has recently (October 2011) been used to assess The Works, an urban regeneration project in Ebbw Vale, Wales, where a £350-million scheme for 500 houses, a hospital, schools and offices is planned. The plan scored 87% – the highest rating for a project since the tool was launched.

Another new tool for the early stage of a project was launched recently by the engineering and technology consultancy Encraft, in collaboration with the Carbon Trust. Known as Enplanner 2.0, this independent assessment tool is for use in very specific circumstances: to review planned use of on-site renewable energy systems (solar PV and solar thermal, wind turbines, heat pumps et al) in relation to local authority renewable energy policies. This tool aims to make the planning application process simpler for both applicants and local authorities by automatically assessing plans of any size – from a home extension to a large housing or industrial scheme – against the relevant local authority's renewable energy policy and creating an energy statement at the touch of a button. Enplanner 2.0 also includes capital cost estimates and revenue projections for all types of renewable projects, helping users to prepare more accurate business cases.

At the other end of the project lifecycle is Soft Landings, which was developed by BSRIA, the Usable Buildings Trust and the architect Mark Way, as a way for project teams to remain engaged with the performance of the building after hand-over. Soft Landings has been successful over a number of years, and was revised recently to ensure that it aligns closely with BREEAM 2011. Crucially, though, it is not a tick-box assessment process, or even a licensed process. The Soft Landings work steps can (and should) be tailored to suit a project's particular circumstances – in other words, it's up to the project team how to use it.

One recent success was Soft Landings' role in helping the architectural practice Architype to gain Building magazine's 'Cut the carbon' award. In this particular case, a researcher from Oxford Brookes University worked with Architype under a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTN) funded by the government-backed Technology Strategy Board (TSB), using the Soft Landings procedures and checklists to conduct a number of assessments of completed Architype projects. Results were fed back in a 'virtuous circle' to improve the buildings' performance and make them more sustainable over the long term while also informing Architype's project procedures to improve the standard of yet-to-be designed buildings (further details of the project outcomes will be published by Oxford Brookes Department of Architecture in due course).

BSRIA describes Soft Landings as a complement to other assessment systems, in that it is "designed to be the underpinning chassis for environmental assessments like BREEAM and LEED, all forms of energy performance certification, post-occupancy evaluation (POE), building logbooks, green leases, and industry key performance indicators (KPIs)".

The real benefit of Soft Landings, though, is that it puts the user at the heart of the process, helping clients and occupants to better understand how to control the building for, as all the other assessment tools acknowledge, it is the users and occupants who will have the ultimate control over the building's sustainability.

The South East Centre for the Built Environment, is running two workshops on Soft Landings and building performance evaluation in December 2011, including site visits to SusCon and Crawley Library. Contact Tina McGeachan for details: Tina@secbe.org.uk.

Related NBS information:

Articles:

• BREEAM Assessment methods
• Environmental construction: methods of assessing buildings
• Before you start building "green"

Selected links:

• Guide to BREEAM
• Green building
• Sustainable development

Written November 2011

 

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