The University College of Estates Management has received a BREEAM Excellent rating for its commitment to sustainability
The BREEAM Excellent rating has been awarded to the University College of Estates Management (UCEM).
UCEM provides supported online learning for built environment professionals. The rating was awarded due to its commitment to sustainable construction during the refurbishment of its new premises. This enabled the university college to achieve one of the highest scores recorded under the dedicated Refurbishment and Fit-Out Scheme in the UK.
As part of the refurbishment, UCEM moved to new premises in the town centre after more than four decades operating from the University of Reading’s Whiteknights campus.
UCEM Principal Ashley Wheaton said: “After more than 40 years of occupation at Whiteknights we saw the move as a significant milestone in our history, reflecting our independence as an academic institution with our own degree awarding powers and progression to full university status.”
Ensuring sustainability was one of the key criteria for the refurbishment of the new headquarters—a three storey building built in the 1980s and located on Queens Road in Reading.
“It was part of our culture,” Wheaton said. “If we were going to include environmental sustainability in our core curriculum, then we had to ‘walk the walk’ in our own ethos and operations.
“Even though we were up against deadlines we wanted to achieve the best in sustainable design and technology, so we looked at BREEAM accreditation as a model for achieving our goals.
“The next step was assembling a team that would bring all of the elements together, from sourcing materials to applying energy efficient technologies and recyclability,” he added.
Fit-out specialists Overbury came on board to help with the refurbishment. Project manager Joe Croft said: “With a total area of 2,118m2 the project was aimed to be one of few certified to BREEAM’s Refurbishment and Fit Out Scheme 2014 including new aspects such as direct recycling of waste from site, back to manufacturer.
“The client wanted to demonstrate international excellence in sustainable refurbishment to both students and academia with the aim of influencing future best practice in industry, but we were also in no doubt that it was a difficult 1980s building to achieve high performance standards to get to BREEAM Excellent.”
Overbury were joined on the project by property programme managers Taurus; environmental consultants and BREEAM assessors Hilson Moran; and advisor Anna Scally, of GVA Acuity.
The new building comprises of a number of sustainable features, including refrigerant flow air conditioning, photovoltaic panels, insulated cavity walls, time controlled LEDs, and numerous energy saving devices.
Croft said: “The deadlines certainly made us and the contractors think. We even looked at pre-assessment of materials before tendering, which gave us a distinct time advantage. But it was the client’s enthusiasm that drove the entire process right down to weekly reporting meetings.”
UCEM moved into the new premises in July this year and is already seeing benefits of the sustainability measures implemented. Thirty-eight photovoltaic panels have been sold back to the grid and cloud computing software has cut down on computer usage.
Anna Scally, of GVA Acuity said: “I don’t think we’ve worked on such an ambitious project, especially where reporting and assessing was an ongoing process. But without the BREEAM methodology, I think the whole process would have fallen apart.”
