Search Results for: sustainability

November 30, 2015

BRE acquires rival green building scheme to create new accreditation ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

Those bewildered by the confusion of acronyms that surrounds building environmental standards will be pleased to hear that BRE has acquired a rival standard to merge with itsBREEAM accreditation. BRE claims that the acquisition of CEEQUAL, a sustainability scheme for civil engineering, allows it to ‘create a single, science based standard and certification tool for civil engineering and infrastructure projects’. As a result of the acquisition, CEEQUAL will transfer its operations to BRE Global after which CEEQUAL will then be delivered by the BREEAM certification team with support from a CEEQUAL management team. The move is supported by the Institution of Civil Engineers and has been prompted by ‘the industry’s desire for a single sustainability rating scheme that addresses the challenges that infrastructure clients, professions and contractors currently face in delivering more sustainable and resilient infrastructure.’

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November 23, 2015

RIBA signs UN Compact as part of an increased focus on ethics ⁰

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Property

RIBA (The Royal Institute of British Architects) has become a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and has undertaken to support its principles on human rights, labour standards, the environment and corruption. Joining the UNGC is part of the RIBA’s focus on ethics which has recently included co-founding a new coalition to develop a set of globally recognised ethics standards for real estate and related professional organisations. RIBA President Jane Duncan said: “As our profession changes and becomes increasingly international, so must our approach to developing and reinforcing professional ethics. Architecture has a direct impact on societies and economies; it shapes and influences the world we live in. For this reason, we architects have a duty to uphold the highest standards wherever we practice. I am delighted that RIBA has signed the UN Global Compact and undertaken to support and promote its principles.”

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November 17, 2015

Best tall building in the world winner announced at Chicago event ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Architecture, Cities, Environment, News

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Awards Jury has announced that Bosco Verticale, Milan, is the overall “2015 Best Tall Building Worldwide” at the 14th Annual CTBUH International Best Tall Building Awards Symposium, Ceremony & Dinner, held last week at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. In July, the CTBUH Awards Jury named a winner from each of the four competing regions in the world: Americas, Asia & Australasia, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. The Regional Winners were One World Trade Center, New York City, United States; CapitaGreen, Singapore; Bosco Verticale, Milan, Italy; Burj Mohammed Bin Rashid Tower, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Although the overall winner was primarily a residential tower, offices were well represented in the regional winners thanks to the inclusion of One World Trade Center and Capita Green.

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November 5, 2015

Design for performance study looks to improve energy performance ⁰

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Environment, Facilities management, News

Developers, owners and occupiers of buildings might expect that compliance with regulations will produce a building that is energy efficient in operation and well on its way towards the 2020 nearly-zero energy target mandated by a European Directive. In practice, the actual performance of most buildings falls well short of the design intent – the so-called performance gap. In Australia, this chronic problem has been eliminated for new office building projects in which clients and their teams sign up to – and then follow – a “Commitment Agreement” protocol to design, construct and manage their buildings to achieve agreed levels of actual in-use performance. Now with the backing of the Better Buildings Partnership, a four month study to develop a prototype UK scheme which embraces Australia’s ‘design for performance’ approach has been launched by a team led by Verco and including BSRIA, Arup and UBT.

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October 28, 2015

UK firms turn to flexible working and wellbeing to bridge productivity gap ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Wellbeing, Workplace

It’s not just larger organisations and governments that are having to grapple with the UK’s persistent ‘productivity puzzle’ but also smaller businesses who are increasingly turning to flexible working and other people centric initiatives to address the problem. That is one of the main findings of a new report from trade association Group Risk Development (GRiD). According to their survey, nearly a quarter of employers (23 percent) believe productivity is an issue facing their business. According to the office for National Statistics (ONS) this is a common problem across the entire UK economy as output per hour is stubbornly around 20 percent below the average for all G7 economies. This is the widest gap ever recorded and, according to GRiD is driving employers to seek ways of addressing their own shortfall with flexible working and wellbeing initiatives as well as investment in new equipment and technology.

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October 26, 2015

An updated green building standard designed to meet wider business objectives ⁰

by Sue Gregson • Comment, Facilities management, Legal news, Property

The publication in September 2015 of the revised ISO 14001 Global Environmental Management Standard has been heralded as a move that will “shift business focus on the environment from compliance with regulations and direct operations, to placing the environment at the heart of thinking and strategy.” This will assist businesses around the world to respond to increasing global sustainability challenges and ensure long-term business success. Currently there are over 300,000 organisations worldwide that are certified to the ISO 14001 Standard, first published in 1996. According to the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, (IEMA) ISO 14001 is the second most used standard companies employ to manage their performance globally, with 171 countries now represented. Its popularity as a management tool has been linked to both improved financial and environmental performance.

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October 1, 2015

US sees biggest jump in working from home since 2008, claims study ⁰

by Neil Franklin • Flexible working, Knowledge, News, Wellbeing

According to an analysis of the just-released 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, approximately 3.7 million US employees (2.5 percent of the workforce) called home their primary place of work in 2014. This represents a 6.5 percent increase and the largest year over year growth in the number of people working from home since before the recession. The ACS data is based on a nationwide survey of answers to the question “What was your primary means of travel to work during the survey week—’Worked at Home’ is one of the choices. The count only includes those who work at home at least half of the time. According to Global Workplace Analytics far more people work at home on a less frequent basis and many work in “third places” such as coffee shops, co-working facilities, libraries, and just about anywhere there’s an internet connection.

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September 24, 2015

Weighing up the pros and cons of the BREEAM environmental standard ⁰

by Charles Marks • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

For some years there has been a growing awareness of the need to improve the environmental performance of buildings. This is closely linked to both the Government’s own international commitments to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 35 years and the need of organisations to act ethically and cut costs while they’re about it. Buildings are important in this regard because of their impact on the environment (and the bottom line). According to The Carbon Trust, buildings produce around 37 percent of the UK’s total carbon emissions, 40 percent of it from commercial buildings.This is commendable stuff but the real problems arise when it comes to meeting such laudable goals in practice. We are learning all the time about how to achieve the best results and we are helped in that with the availability of a number of increasingly sophisticated building environmental standards.

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September 21, 2015

Five essential office design trends to look for in the near future ⁰

by Tom Brialey • Comment, Facilities management, Flexible working, Workplace design

Since the early Twentieth Century, business leaders have been experimenting with office design in an attempt to improve productivity. From the sea of forward-facing desks imagined by Frederick Taylor, to the infamous cubicle of the late 1960s, to today’s open-plan office, each innovation has said something about our changing relationship to work. In a Gensler survey with more than 2,000 participants, 90 percent of respondents indicated that better workplace design and layout result in better overall performance. The greatest developments of recent times have emerged from the tech giants of Silicon Valley, where businesses have blended playfulness, company culture and the collaborative benefits of open layouts to craft unique and engaging spaces. So where are we headed? Here are five major trends that are likely to have a lasting impact on the way we work.

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August 18, 2015

That story about sexist air conditioning systems…roundly debunked ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Wellbeing, Workplace

The main story of the silly season so far has been that one about the inherent sexism of air conditioning systems from a week or two back. Based on a study published in the esoteric journal Nature Climate Change, it appeared that standards for heating and ventilation in building systems were founded on the metabolic rate of an average man which suggested women were toiling away in unconducive, if not exactly unbearable, conditions. This was a compelling tale picked up worldwide by major media outlets including The New Yorker and The Daily Telegraph. There were only two problems with it all. Firstly, the original study was extremely flimsy, based on a tiny sample and ignorant of some basic facts. Secondly the science behind it has now been roundly rejected by ASHRAE, the main US body responsible for informing debate on such matters.

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July 21, 2015

Neocon highlights four of the world’s most important office design trends

by Neil Franklin • Comment, Events, Workplace design

We live in the Global Village, Marshall McLuhan’s idea from 1962 of an electronically contracted world in which attitudes, cultures and our political, business and legislative framework begin to pull together. Yet each nation is shaped by little differences. That is why the comedy programme The Office found an audience on both sides of the pond, but one that needed Wernham Hogg in Slough to become Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Pennsylvania for it to work for the local audience. The central idea of the show has a universal appeal but needs a local voice. And what is true for The Office with a big O is also true for the office with a small o. This was the takeaway conclusion of a series of events staged in London and Manchester last week by Milliken and Humanscale. The touchstone for these events was a debate about the main conclusions of of June’s Neocon.

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July 14, 2015

Occupiers give big thumbs down to service levels from property sector

by Neil Franklin • Facilities management, News, Property

The property sector offers its customers pretty appalling customer service, according to a ‘damning’ new report from the British Council of Offices (BCO). The study, based on the experiences of just 64 occupiers claims that fewer than one in five (17 percent) rate their property management service as “good” or “excellent” and fewer than one in three feeling that their suppliers understood their business needs. The survey found that although customer service is lacking, satisfaction with the end product itself was high, with two out of three occupiers happy with the quality of their office and three out of four perceiving quality to have improved over the past 10 years. The report sets out a 10-point action plan to improve the service occupiers receive, including adopting a new definition of “building performance” set by the BCO and encouraging more transparency.