Three outstanding examples of sustainable design have won the Property Council of Australia / Rider Levett Bucknall 2014 Innovation & Excellence Awards.
Winners included JLL for best workplace, the GPT Group for its Olympic Park development and Mirvac for the refurbishment of 10-20 Bond Street.
Meanwhile, the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) has released the draft credits for the new Green Star – Design & As Built rating tool and is calling on industry to provide feedback. The feedback period is open until July 31, 2014.
“This is a major milestone in the evolution of Green Star,” said GBCA CEO Romilly Madew. Green Star – Design & As Built, a ‘next generation’ Green Star rating tool, will be able to assess the sustainability achievements of most building uses in Australia with the exception of single-unit dwellings, and will cover single-use and mixed-use buildings at both the design and construction phases.
“This is the first time we have released an entire suite of draft credits for public comment. We have also released the set of submission templates that will accompany the rating tool to encourage industry feedback on the benchmarks, credit criteria and documentation requirements,” Madew said.
“One of the many new approaches we are undertaking is to introduce new options for demonstrating compliance. Project teams will be able to choose either a ‘deemed to satisfy’ approach or a ‘modelled performance’ approach. This will enable project teams to customise their Green Star submissions based on budgets and objectives and still demonstrate achievement of sustainable outcomes.”
The credit review process has identified a number of credits that could be removed, as well as emerging issues that should be rewarded in new or substantially revised credits.
These include Adaptation and Resilience, which rewards solutions that address the impact of extreme weather events; Material Life Cycle Impacts, which enables the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to demonstrate reduced sustainability impacts against established benchmarks and Heat Island Effect Reduction, which rewards projects that reduce the impacts of heat island effects in the building’s immediate area.