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Photo: Tinaz Karbhari
October 14, 2016 / The National Business Review
Special
Report
From facing page
Eco Business
Most large companies are already on a path which, at least slowly and incrementally, improves their environmental (and sometimes social)
performances. Also encouraging is instances of “green” appear to be outpacing conventional segments in almost every industry. But are
companies truly stepping up efforts to address the full range of sustainability impacts, or is it just a few leaders?
Babbage ‘quietly chips away’ as it
awaits green build tipping point
Nick Grant
When people consider “green” in
a commercial sense they think of
green buildings. However, green
buildings remain a niche in the
construction industry for several
reasons: the fact there are so
many buildings going up at the
moment; New Zealand’s abundant renewable energy sources
mitigating against any real sense
of needing to do anything differently; and the perception it’s
going to cost more.
Babbage Consultants senior
architect and sustainability manager Michelle Johansson says
sometimes sustainable buildings
do cost more but she concedes
it is “because people aren’t used
to doing them and the systems
used don’t cater to them. So you
end up with a cobbled together
hit and miss approach where
nobody knows where they stand.
“But if you have good systems – as the industry has now in
terms of everyday building – that
will iron out those issues.”
Taking an approach that
involves integrated design and
early contractor involvement (or
ECI) will reduce the cost of a sus-
tainable building.
“What it basically boils down
is everybody in the team getting together really early on and
using all their knowledge around
the table to come up with some
really effective solutions that may
not have happened by following
the standard linear process,” Ms
Johansson says.
“It’s got to the point where
I wouldn’t do any job, green or
otherwise, without that process
– it’s just so good. You end up
without any or very few costly
surprises down the track.”
There is also increasing data
about the savings a sustainable
building can realise over time,
she points out, now that some
of some Green Star structures
have been standing for almost a
decade.
Although it won’t motivate
developers who are in and out of
a project as quickly as possible,
the benefits the owner of a green
building can enjoy include lower
operating costs, enhanced marketability and longer term tenants. Occupiers, meanwhile, tend
to report happier employees who
take fewer sick days, ultimately
leading to much less churn.
INTEGRATED WITH ENVIRONMENT: Babbage’s work on Remarkables
Primary School won the firm many awards
Tipping point to come
“Eventually the market will
demand more green buildings,”
Ms Johansson says.
“There will be a tipping point,
whether it’s a cost-driven incentive or something else – solar
energy might take off once coal
runs out, for example.”
In the meantime, “Babbage is
the same as other big practices
that talk about sustainability –
unless we get the right client in
the door, it’s not always achievable to do sustainable office projects,” she says.
“It’s a slow ship to turnaround.
The trick is to have the building blocks and systems in place
to make sustainable projects less
onerous and easier to achieve –
and to clean up our own house
first – so if and when those jobs
do come along we’re ready for
them.
“In the interim, you quietly
chip away.”
In some ways that suits Ms
Johansson.
“I’m more about incremental
change, rather than disruption.
Disruption has its place but it
can be overbearing and often
temporary,” she says.
“My ultimate goal is for people to do green buildings accidently and for us not to have to
have a conversation about the
benefits because they’re happening as the norm.”
Multi-disciplinary
Babbage Consultants began in
1936 as a small engineering firm.
It was founded by Alistair
Babbage, the great grandson of
Charles Babbage, the polymath
veyors, and bio researchers who
work on protecting endangered
native flora and fauna.
“Our great depth of disciplines, and the technical knowledge that comes with it, is one
of our major strengths,” says Ms
Johansson.
That depth includes being
“easily able to handle any job
LEADING BY EXAMPLE: As a carbon zero certified company, Babbage’s own
offices are increasingly ‘green’
inventor of the difference engine,
widely considered the world’s
first computer.
Eighty years on, the multidisciplinary practice boasts
about 180 staff and has offices
in Auckland, Hamilton, Taupo,
Christchurch and Melbourne.
In addition to engineers with
structural, civil, geo-technical,
environmental, mechanical, electrical and hydraulic
expertise, the firm now also has
architects, land and building sur-
The National Business Review / October 14, 2016
that involves ‘deep green’ work
in-house.”
Core capability and
principle
Ms Johansson has professional
accreditation with Green Star (a
tool that rates the sustainability
of commercial buildings), while
an engineer colleague is accredited with Nabers (a system for
rating office buildings’ energy
Continued on P21
sustainability business, it’s all in one,” he
says.
“Because we’ve had some pretty
unique ideas and feedback, the biggest
challenge is developing new ideas into a
reality.”
Blenheim-based Yealands is also
audited annually to review its greenhouse
gas emissions and the company says unavoidable emissions, such as the production of glass bottles and freight to market,
are subject to it.
The company purchases carbon credits
to offset what it emits.
DB sets lofty goal
Meanwhile, DB Breweries says in its second annual sustainability report it has
reduced water consumption by 14.4%
since 2005, and decreased greenhouse gas
emissions by 41% since 2008.
DB has the ambitious goal of becoming
New Zealand’s most sustainable alcohol
producer, no easy feat for a beer and cider
producer.
In the report, DB says water fills 95% of
its finished beer products, which is why it
has focused on reducing water consumption per litre of beer or cider from 3.5 litres
to 3.47 litres from 2014 to 2015.
DB is aiming to have its Waitemata
Brewery function on 100% renewable
energy by 2020.
SPECIAL REPORT: ECO BUSINESS 21
A great modern examples of putting
byproducts to good use is DB Export
Brewtroleum, a fuel made from a byproduct of beer unveiled in July last year.
The company produces roughly
572,000 litres of yeast slurry (the byproduct) each year, and disposes of roughly
150,000 litres.
DB used the excess slurry to create fuelgrade ethanol by fermenting the biomass,
a process similar to the beer brewing process. The ethanol is then added to petrol
to create a biofuel.
“The end-result is DB Export Brewtroleum, a high performance 98-octane fuel
made with 10% sustainable bio-ethanol,
which emits up to 8% less carbon dioxide
than other high performance fuels – as
well as being a renewable biofuel that is
more sustainable,” DB spokesman Simon
Smith says.
A batch of 300,000 litres was produced,
enough for six weeks at 60 Gull stations.
Mr Smith says DB doesn’t have any
plans to produce more Brewtroleum at
the moment because it hasn’t produced
enough yeast slurry.
But DB has advised a Mexican-based
business, which is also in the Heineken
family, about how to produce Brewtroleum.
Mr Smith is coy on whether the company will go ahead with its own version of
Brewtroleum.
[email protected]
Babbage ‘quietly chips away’
From P16
efficiency).
Babbage staff are
working on a 5 Green
Star project (five denotes
“New Zealand excellence,”
while a four equates to
best practice and a six is
considered “world leadership”).
But even during those
periods when the company isn’t undertaking
sustainability focused projects for a client, it’s doing
such work internally.
As Ms Johansson
notes, the way in which it
is embedded at the core
of Babbage’s practice is
emphatically signalled
by the way in which
“sustainability” is the first
word in the company’s
mission statement (the
others, in case you’re wondering, are “team work,
innovation, professionalism, respect”).
“We’ve got carbon zero
certification as a New Zea-
land-wide company, and
were the first architecture
firm to do so,” she says.
“That involves reducing energy use and carbon
emissions. It’s really gone
to the heart of the business, because we have to
monitor everything.”
Essentially it’s “like a
audited.”
The company has “got
a list of things we’re following up on in the office
– from the feasibility of a
complete refit of the LED
lights down to having
planter boxes outside.”
Although Ms Johansson
readily acknowledges the
contribution of the latter
to the reduction of emissions is minor, “we want
to have a visual symbol
of what we’re doing to
illustrate the less obvious
things, like reduced power
bills.”
Cost perceptions
SUSTAINABLY SPEAKING:
Michelle Johannson
microcosm of what New
Zealand signed up for
with the Paris Agreement,”
she says. “Babbage has to
reduce carbon emissions
by a certain percentage by
a certain time – and we get
Despite Babbage having a
great deal of sustainability
expertise under one roof –
something it seeks to leverage via an informal forum
in which staff “investigate
ways to combine each
other’s knowledge of different disciplines” – that
capability isn’t constantly
being utilised by clients.
[email protected]