50 sustainability stars

Now in its third year, Building’s annual compilation of the brightest up-and-coming talent in the sustainability sector is once again full of high-quality candidates. Despite the best efforts of some within government to “cut the green crap”, the construction sector’s enthusiasm for green buildings hasn’t waned and now more than ever there are a raft of consultants, contractors, surveyors, and even a zoologist, eager to take the industry forward.

This year’s top 50, gathered here at the highly sustainable WWF headquarters in Woking, were selected by asking leading figures in the sustainability sector, past rising star members, and Ecobuild speakers, for nominations, including their reason for nominating their chosen person. The final list was then whittled down by Building’s editorial team. With every one of this year’s Top 50 making a name for themselves and set to climb higher still, the future’s bright - and it’s green.

Alex Willey
Asset strategy manager, Affinity Sutton
Willey led Affinity Sutton’s FutureFit and EnergyFit research initiatives, which have given the social housing provider insight into the performance of retrofit measures and the importance of energy advice that it is now using to inform retrofit programmes across its stock.

Alice Flint
Sustainability co-ordinator, Lovell Partnerships
Flint joined affordable housing provider Lovell in September 2013 directly from York University. In her job, she is responsible for promoting sustainability within the firm and encouraging her colleagues to reduce carbon emissions, cut waste and use sustainable procurement methods. She says she wants Lovells to be a leader in sustainable building in the next 10 years.

Caroline Johnstone
Sustainability manager, Miller Homes
Last year, Johnstone produced Miller Homes’ corporate social responsibility report, which netted the firm first place in consultant Jones Lang LaSalle’s (JLL) NextGeneration phase one assessment, which assesses firms’ public sustainability reporting.

Cat Hirst
Education manager, UK Green Building Council
Hirst was inspired to work in sustainability when she got a children’s book about the environment as a sixth birthday present. She was responsible for putting together UKGBC’s Future Leaders programme, which aims to educate professionals on sustainability early in their career and provide peer-to-peer support.

Chris Kowalenko
Group sustainability commercial manager, Keepmoat
Sustainable heating and electricity technologies fascinate Kowalenko. “The engineer in me enjoys pushing the boundaries of new technologies while the economist in me appreciates the benefit of reducing fuel poverty and reliance on fossil fuels,” he says. He has been heavily involved in housing provider Keepmoat’s delivery of massive solar photovoltaic schemes.

Chris Pountney
Principal engineer, sustainability, Aecom
Pountney works on policy development for the UK government as well as supporting building design teams to predict environmental performance. He believes sustainable design requires an integrated approach from design teams and says his biggest achievement in sustainability has been “to make even a small contribution to the trajectory of the UK towards a lower carbon economy through the revisions to the Building Regulations”.

David Leonard
BREEAM new construction manager, Building Research Establishment
At BRE Leonard has been involved in introducing sustainability standard BREEAM into China and Russia. He worked on the assessment and development of the Franshion Green Building Exhibition Centre in the Meixi Lake Eco-City, which is thought to be the first project in China to monitor the embodied energy of its materials.

David Williams
Procurement manager, Balfour Beatty
Williams’ role isn’t dedicated to sustainability but he says it is core to Balfour Beatty’s business. Williams played a key role in developing the contractor’s policy on engagement with smaller suppliers, a move designed to help meet the firms’ social sustainability aims.

Edith Colomba
Sustainability consultant, HTA Design
Colomba developed the Italian Environment and Energy Research Centre’s database for construction materials, which scores products by environmental impact across their whole lifecycle. A trained architect, at HTA she provides environmental assessments and life cycle costing analysis on the firm’s designs.

Emma Grace
Implementation technical co-ordinator, DPWorld London Gateway
Grace put together the environmental statement for the 829,700m2 London Gateway development - the largest logistics centre in Europe. In her day-to-day work she does everything from audits of contractors’ environmental practice to liaising with the local community and stakeholders.

Helen Brown
Head of building physics, Encraft
After becoming a certified Passivhaus consultant Helen trained and developed a team at Encraft that specialises in building physics consultancy. In 2011-12 the team delivered the second project in the UK to be certified under the stringent Passivhaus retrofit standard known as EnerPHit.

Jane Wakiwaka
Senior consultant, Environ UK
Wakiwaka says that her life in Japan, before she moved to the UK, made her painfully aware of the need to manage scarce resources and limited space in the built environment. She currently provides energy and sustainability advice to Environ’s clients.

Jonathan Waite
Project engineer, Grontmij
Waite was praised by the person who nominated him for his ability to find innovative sustainable solutions on projects. She said: “He is extremely enthusiastic and clearly dedicated to providing and communicating the right solutions covering environmental and social sustainability.”

Karl Walker
Associate, URS
Walker is proud of his work on Brent Civic centre, dubbed “the UK’s greenest council building”, which uses solar shading, natural ventilation, a high-performance facade, and a combined cooling, heating and power system that utilises waste fish oil.

Keeran Jugdoyal
Senior consulting engineer, Faithful and Gould
Jugdoyal led the post-occupancy evaluation of Marks and Spencers’ flagship sustainable store at Cheshire Oaks which received the best building performance of the year award from the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers last month.

Leanne McMillan
Associate director, Building Research Establishment
At BRE’s Scottish branch, McMillan leads a five-strong team who evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and advise on improvements. Her work also includes improving the building’s function for its residents, including aspects such as air quality and lighting levels.

Lorraine Fursland
Head of sustainability, Berkeley Group
Fursland joined Berkeley in 2010 where she spends much of her time working to develop new approaches to sustainability. She says one of her biggest achievements is changing the metrics the firm uses to measure its sustainability achievements to align them more closely with the wider business’ goals.

Matt Stevenson
Director, Carbonlite Design and Build
Contractor Carbonlite Design and Build specialises, as the name suggests, in low carbon buildings with high levels of locally sourced materials. Stevenson says the firm’s construction system, which also uses all natural materials, is his biggest achievement. He wants to make the firm’s product a “mainstream alternative” to traditional building systems in the next 10 years.

Michael Henderson
Associate director, sustainability, Aecom
Improving green infrastructure is the real key to tackling climate change, according to Henderson. That’s why he is involved in sustainability policy development and masterplanning. He says he hopes to be on the “frontline” of tackling climate adaptation in 10 years time and hopes that by then sustainable building will be standard practice in the industry.

Mike Trousdell
Senior mechanical engineer, Arup
Before joining Arup in 2007, Trousdell worked for an energy firm and managed the construction of five wind farms in Spain and Greece.  As a senior engineer, Trousdell works on a wide range of building projects. A colleague who nominated Trousdell said: “He listens attentively to others,
rephrases what they say and suggests innovative solutions which often astound others.”

Moira Thomas
Carbon plan manager, John Lewis
Thomas says working in sustainability was a “natural progression” from studying natural sciences at university. She played a key role in shaping John Lewis Partnership’s carbon plan which commits it to deliver absolute reductions in its operational carbon emissions by 2020.

Niall Robertson
Associate director, Jones Lang LaSalle
Robertson became interested in sustainability because he wanted to embed sustainable design into the commercial fit outs he was working on as a chartered building surveyor. He now provides advice to JLL’s commercial clients on shopping centres, office and industrial buildings.

Nick Newman
Head of sustainability, ECD Architects
Inspired by working with sustainability guru Lynne Sullivan, partner at Sustainable by Design, when he was at architect Broadway Malyan, Newman went on to join ECD Architects where he does post-occupancy evaluation, internal training, design audits and research alongside design work on low energy refurbishment.

Philip Charles
Operations director, CEEQUAL
Charles joined CIRIA in 2002 where he is responsible for a range of projects in the research programme. He also delivers the CEEQUAL rating system. He aspires to be a leading figure in sustainability in the industry and looks forward to “identifying the challenges and opportunities of delivering continuous improvement”.

Rachael Baldwin
Sustainability manager, Skanska UK
“I was always intrigued with the balance of nature and how humans impact on this balance,” says Baldwin. She now manages Skanska’s team of environmental managers across its facilities management service.

Rebecca Trevalyan
Forum for the Future Scholar, Carillion
Trevalyan is currently completing a year-long masters course while at contractor Carillion, where she runs the company’s sustainability awards.

Richard Fitton
Energy House technical manager, University of Salford
At the University of Salford, Fitton runs the Salford Energy House test facility, where he says he can make a difference by generating evidence to underpin the case for sustainability. He also works to develop measuring and testing procedures. “We often talk about a performance gap in terms of building materials or processes, but if we are to be confident about what we say, we need to make sure we are measuring properly,” he says.

Richard Twinn
Policy officer, UKGBC
According to Twinn, it was just a “coincidence” that he ended up working in sustainability. Clearly he has grown to feel passionate about the sector though because when Building asks where he’d like to be in 10 years’ time, he says: “With a government who genuinely understand that sustainability is good business. At the very least though, I don’t want to still be talking about how to resuscitate the Green Deal.”

Richard Hirst
Sustainability manager, Skanska UK
Before getting into the construction sector Hirst managed an eco-tourism business in South-east Asia, where he says the level of river pollution inspired him to work in sustainability. Now at Skanska, he worked on the London Olympics sustainability team and delivered its highly sustainable infrastructure.

Richard Holland
Lead technologist for low impact building, Technology Strategy Board
Holland is proud of his work managing the Technology Strategy Board’s retrofit analysis project, which has collected performance data from over 100 retrofitted homes. He says seeing projects that use the innovations and data developed by the Technology Strategy Board inspires him.

Sam Foster
Founder, Sam Foster Architects
Foster says leading architect Howard Liddell taught him there was “no excuse” for architecture to have anything other than a positive effect on the environment when they worked together. He set up his own practice two years ago and works mostly on housing projects for private clients.

Stephen Passmore
Technical delivery manager, Energy Saving Trust
The focus of Passmore’s work is in demonstrating the performance of retrofit projects and developing more comfortable low-energy homes.

Steven Haynes
Solicitor, Marks & Spencer
The retail giant has been busy rolling out its first green leasing policy, which Haynes has been at the centre of, over the last year. The clauses, which it has inserted into contracts with nine landlords so far, aim to create a framework to allow tenant and landlord to work more collaboratively to improve the performance of a building.

Thomas Beney
Principal consultant - climate change, Capita
A zoologist by training, Beney says sustainability was a “natural” fit for his career when he had finished studying at university. He has helped the United Nations Environment Programme develop finance mechanisms to enable the finance sector account for businesses’ greenhouse gas emissions.

Thomas Lefevre
Director, environmental consultant Etude
Lefevre’s biggest achievement is setting up Etude: “Starting up a company forces you to be humble, understand projects and clients better and provide relevant advice.” He says sustainability is about buildings and people not report writing.