Building services firm Fulcrum Consulting is well known for its innovative low energy building designs, but how well does it do at cutting down on its own carbon emissions. Following the 100 days of Carbon Clean-up campaign building physics engineer Suzie Diamond gives an overview of what they've achieved.

Our 100 days are up, and we reached our target! Back in July when Fulcrum joined CIBSE’s 100 days of carbon clean-up campaign we set ourselves the target of reducing our annual emissions by the volume of carbon that would fill our office building. We calculated the total annual savings as just over 6.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Our success came with our final electricity meter readings. We ran a comparison of these against readings taken for the same period last year and showed a saving of 3.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide (a 30% reduction).

Minus the savings we have already accounted for, this gave us an extra 2.5 tonnes towards out target. We can attribute this saving to our diligence with turning off lights, fans, monitors etc when we are not using them.

As a naturally ventilated office with no air conditioning or lifts, we started from a reasonably carbon-virtuous position. However, there were several initiatives which proved impossible to quantify in terms of carbon savings. These include recycling. The volumes and variety of waste that we recycle though have (from observation) increased dramatically.

Purchasing changes have also had a significant environmental benefits (even if we can't quantify them) - using recycled toilet rolls, ecological cleaning products and fair trade tea and coffee will all help in different ways. We are also in the process of switching our electricity contract over to a provider of "green" electricity. However, this won't happen until our present contract runs out in November and so couldn't be included in our totals either.

The results of our BREEAM assessment for the building show that we currently achieve a rating of "Good". We have already identified and had management approval for a number of measures which should enable us to reach a rating of "Very Good" by the end of the year and "Excellent" by the end of 2008.

These include writing and instigating an environmental policy, improving our existing environmental purchasing policy, achieving ISO14001 (the environmental management standard) status, committing to regular energy audits and targeting reductions in CO2 emissions for the future. This is exciting as it enables us to take the work we've done on our 100 days campaign forward and provides a tangible way of tracking our progress.

We are proud of the changes we have made to our company in 100 days and are keen that it won't stop here. We have shifted our purchasing and disposal habits as an organisation and taken steps to reduce wastage and cut our energy bills. These are intended as permanent changes and we are setting targets to further reduce our environmental impact over the coming years.

Susie Diamond, Building Physics Engineer

Source

Building Sustainable Design