12

Ingenuity House – Commercial Office

Ingenuity House (aka Project Beagle) is the flagship new head office for Interserve.  The building in Birmingham will see Interserve’s international support services and construction group consolidate its operations.

The offices are designed to Breeam 2014 Excellent and the primary motivation for the LCA was to award credits under Mat01.  Interserve contracted eTool on a consulting basis to complete a whole of building Life Cycle Assessment and the project earned the two bonus Mat01 credits available for undertaking an LCA.  These were awarded in addition to the traditional Green Guide route

The study was completed towards the end of detailed design and the team was able to clearly understand all aspects of the buildings life cycle impacts and appreciate the differences that some of their sustainability initiatives made on the buildings’ quantified environmental performance.

eTool modelling software eToolLCD is compliant with the IMPACT methodology and datasets. The scope and system boundaries align with the requirements for the Life Cycle credit and the LCA model for Project Beagle has been formally verified by the BRE.

Results Summary

Impact CategoryUnit                  Life Cycle Quantity

(Stage A-C)

Global Warming Potentialkg CO2e / m2 (GFA)

26

Acidificationkg SO2e / m2 (GFA)

0.25

Euthophicationkg PO4e / m2 (GFA)

0.042

Human Toxicitykg 1,4-DBe / m2 (GFA)

17

beagle-graph

Project features

Materials

A lightweight steel structure minimises the requirement for concrete and all concrete that was used has a proportion of blast furnace slag content.  Blast furnace slag has significantly reduced impacts from standard cement.

Forbo carpet flooring has been specified.  Forbo complete Environmental Product Declarations on a large number of their products which tend to perform much better than industry average manufacturing techniques.

One very large contributor to the embodied impacts can be HFC blown XPS (extruded polystyrene) insulation.  The alternative specification of Kinspan Optim R results in a relatively high saving in embodied carbon.

Operational Energy

Energy use accounts for approximately 73% of the life cycle impacts of Project Beagle (assuming todays grid emission factor). The use of roof mounted solar photovoltaics and innovative building integrated solar PV as well as advanced natural ventilation technologies have reduced impacts from operational energy significantly.

Quantified Improvements

This assessment was conducted by Pat.

Pat Hermon