Sustainability

Our commitment to the sustainability agenda is grounded in the reality that every asset we own has an impact on the environment.   However, this presents us with two distinct challenges.

The first is making our new buildings as sustainable as we can and naturally leads to a focus on technology and design to find innovative solutions. It plays to our strong engineering expertise with successes like borehole technology used at One New Change|.

The second challenge is the sustainability in our existing portfolio, where modern working practices and habits place greater environmental strain on buildings that were not designed with today’s environmental agenda in mind. To make a difference in this area, we concentrate on getting closer to our occupiers to drive change through education. Initiatives such as Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) and energy screens in big offices, so workers can easily see their energy consumption and adjust their working behaviours, are just a couple of steps in what will be a long journey.

Sustainable buildings are not just about being green. Sustainability is also about longevity. So many buildings from the 1960s and 70s are being demolished because they cannot adapt to changing demands. Government targets for zero carbon buildings are forcing everyone to find new answers. Our engineers and architects produce buildings that are efficient to run, minimize the use of raw materials, and recycle most of our demolition waste. It’s about integrating all our actions and having the technical knowhow to lead, to challenge, to brief, and to set standards where they don’t exist.

Together with our peers, we use our expertise and knowledge to drive change for the industry through best practice.  We are founding members of the Better Building Partnership with initiatives on green leases, performance benchmarking and sustainable retrofit strategies.

Our approach to managing our environmental impacts is through a structured ISO 14001 certified Environmental Management System (EMS)