70 | BUILDING New Zealand Green Building Council: Hawkins Construction NZGBC - intent on making a difference Virginia Wright Director of Market Transformation Sam Archer, left,presenting the Green Star certificate to University of Auckland Director of Property Services Simon Neale. TimberLab Glulam New Zealand’s Most Sustainable Building Material FSC® (Forest Stewardship Council®) TimberLab holds Chain of Custody Certification Code NC-COC-005630 for the supply of FSC® (Forest Stewardship Council®) certified timber. With FSC certification, we have the proof that our raw materials are obtained from sustainably managed forests, that sourcing of the raw materials is internally monitored and that conditions connected to external monitoring by third parties are TimberLab is proud to have received Declare certification (Living Building Challenge Red List Approved) for 2 products; H1.2 Glulam for interior use, and H3.2 MCA Glulam for exterior use. TimberLab Laboratory Testing for VOC - Awareness of sustainability in our built environment is becoming a key factor in procurement decisions for building materials. Internationally recognised certifications such as Green Building and Living Building are becoming a popular way to measure and monitor the environmental impact of new buildings. More environmental information here - https://www.timberlabsolutions.com/timberlab-sustainability/ VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) Declare Founded in 2006 by 30 construction and property organisations the not-for-profit New Zealand Green Building Council (NZGBC) now has 700 members including all those large construction and property firms listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, the major banks, and associated businesses of all sizes. CEO Andrew Eagles has been with them for the last six years leading a multi-disciplinary team of skilled problem-solvers and communicators. They’re the people behind the Green Star system through which buildings can be rated according to a number of indexes in the pursuit of the NZGBC’s stated goal of ‘healthy and sustainable homes and buildings delivering healthier, happier New Zealanders’. “Our members vary from major players in the construction industry to one man surveyors, sole practitioner architects, one woman engineers, and healthy homes assessors,” says Andrew. Responding to a sector hungry for some certainty around what actually does make a difference in lowering the carbon of a building, and what actually does make a home healthier, the NZGBC has created and adapted international certifications to measure things from the carbon footprint of construction waste going to landfill, to water efficiency, to air quality, daylight considerations, thermal comfort and so on. “We’re a membership organisation which also sells services to help the sector decarbonise and improve health,” says Andrew. “We educate the sector, we’ve got lots of free content on our website but also formal training. We collaborate, we advocate, we help the government think about how they can improve the building code, and we also rate buildings so that you know which buildings are healthier and lower carbon,” says Andrew. The University of Auckland Social Sciences Building 201 is a good example of the Green Star rating system in action. With the highest possible rating of 6 stars, the design was awarded New Zealand’s highest Green Star score yet. Using the Green Star tool to consider their design from the very early stages they adapted things accordingly. “Their completed design certificate shows that their energy efficiency will be far greater than a similar building being built to the current building code,” says Andrew, “and they’ve also done work to massively reduce their embodied carbon impact as well.” New Zealand’s buildings and construction accounts for 20% of our greenhouse gas emissions. It can be described in two ways: operational carbon emissions created when for example we turn on a light, heat water or use a gas stove that uses fossil fuels; embodied emissions are the emissions resulting from the manufacture of the building materials used such as concrete, steel, aluminium and so on. Deciding to keep as much of the existing building as possible instead of following through with their original intention of knocking it down helped the Social Sciences Buildings achieve its high rating but that’s not all, as Simon Neil, the Director of Auckland University Property Services explains. “The change in approach from knocking down to maintaining allowed us to get the project out of the ground quicker by reducing the amount of demolition, and through re-using all of the existing foundations and the structural frame this is a great example where a sustainable approach is achieving on multiple fronts. Improving sustainability, reducing embodied carbon, a shorter build time, and huge financial savings.” Sam Gordon, project manager for Hawkins - the lead contractor on the development, says the “B201 is an exciting project which Hawkins is proud to be constructing for the University of Auckland. It was a project which needed to get underway quickly which involved an overlapped ECI/Design phase whilst demolition works got underway on site. Being a re-use structure lots of workfaces were able to be opened quickly and we currently have around 350 workers on site across a total of 68 different trades. We really enjoy these Greenstar projects, they have a lot of interesting features, and the B201 project has pushed the boundaries again in the sustainable construction space. New Zealand’s future from this sustainable point of view is that we love our existing buildings and make the most of what they have to offer even when they need refreshing, thus reducing the amount of concrete and steel that needs to be made and helping keep carbon low.
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