Sustainable Outcomes and Building Services Engineering

NBS is the official specification and product data partner of CIBSE. The partnership brings together a wealth of information, content, and resources from both organisations, providing support throughout the different stages of a building project. Over the past year, the joint work of NBS and CIBSE has helped supply resources and guidance to the industry – including webinars and technical articles. This article summarises the recent webinar about sustainable outcomes and building services engineering. Furthermore, additional content in the form of speaker discussions is included below.

CIBSE initiatives

Carl Collins, Head of Digital Engineering at CIBSE presented sustainability challenges from the aspects of design and then operation. He also looked at specifying products, the materials they are from and considerations about the circular economy. Two recent CIBSE publications received a focus:

CIBSE TM65 – Embodied carbon in building services: a calculation methodology
CIBSE TM66 – Creating a circular economy in the lighting industry

Carl explained how TM65 provides guidance on Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), and where EPDs do not exist, it provides a methodology to calculate embodied carbon.

Sustainable outcomes

Louise Wille, Associate Sustainability Consultant and Aidan Kelly Senior Mechanical Engineer at XCO2, presented the sustainable outcomes defined by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the contributions that building services can make to each of these.

Examples include how operational carbon emissions can be lowered by designing to minimise energy usage and the utilisation of on-site renewable technologies. Another example presented was how to consider a sustainable water cycle by reducing water usage and utilising greywater recycling and rainwater harvesting.