Winner
Arup and Kingspan Off-Site
Kingspan Lighthouse
This is the first zero-carbon house to achieve a level six rating under the Code for Sustainable Homes. The judges declared it a good example of moving forward residential design.
The Lighthouse was part of the Offsite 2007 exhibition of prefabricated homes at the Building Research Establishment at Garston. The 2½-storey, two-bedroom detached house has optimum energy and water efficiency. It has high insulation, airtightness and thermal bridging standards and is ventilated using whole-house mechanical ventilation with heat recovery.
With all these measures and modest amounts of glazing, the demanding heat loss parameter required for the code was achieved.
Runners-up
Mott MacDonald
At Vulcan House in Sheffield, the new headquarters for the Home Office, there are no biomass boilers, no solar panels and no ground source pumps. The secret to its BREEAM “excellent” rating of 77.79 lies in its holistic design approach, involving orientation, heat recovery ventilators and greywater recycling, among other measures.
Balfour Kilpatrick
The firm plays an active part in sustainability and waste task groups organised by Balfour Beatty. It is working closely with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency on environmental mitigation measures, including the prevention of water course pollution at Whitelee wind farm. Each project the firm undertakes requires an innovations checklist to be completed to identify opportunities for prefabrication and modularisation. Also, a sustainable code of conduct has been established for preferred suppliers.
WSP
The company is working with Guys Marsh prison, Dorset, to provide a highly innovative solution to reduce CO2 emissions and deliver a sustainable waste strategy for a new prison kitchen, using a woodchip biomass boiler.
BDP Sustainability
This division is a growing part of the firm, dedicated to addressing the issues and challenges of sustainable development. As designers and consultants, the team work to raise awareness within BDP and externally, and advise architects and developers. The group has developed a carbon-neutral methodology which has been a key tool in assisting with the understanding of carbon neutrality, commercially and technically.
Earthcare Products
The Hertfordshire company has pre-empted the results of a European Union investigation into refrigerant emissions by developing new refrigerants with low GWP and high critical temperature. It has patented three products: for domestic and commercial air-conditioning and heat pumps; for industrial process, food and blast freezing applications; and for commercial point-of-sale refrigeration and vehicle air-conditioning equipment.
Source
Building Sustainable Design
