Sustainable futures

When discussing the future of the property and construction industry one word recurrently crops up as the crucial issue for the future: sustainability. The concept of sustainable development can represent an array of things dependent on your footing within the industry, ranging from an environmental gimmick to a potential niche market ripe for further expansion.

For Dan Labbad, CEO of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Lend Lease though, it is central to the company’s philosophy and direction. “We see sustainability as being fundamental and what we need to do is turn the thinking and rhetoric into reality”. Turning ideas into actions is something Lend Lease has been doing for a long time.

Formed in Sydney in 1958 by Dick Dusseldorp, Lend Lease has steadily grown into one of the world’s leading property companies. Over time, as the company has developed, it has embraced the importance of sustainability as a prime tenet of the group’s identity and ideology. In doing so, Lend Lease has to strive to ensure that the property it helps to create today, continues to provide effective solutions for the future.

Value
The ultimate value of sustainability is usually something tricky to theorise, although recent technological advancements are beginning to illustrate sustainability’s value better. As Dan states: “Property gives us a great canvas in order to demonstrate what we can do and whether its on our large scale projects looking at different ways of providing energy provision, or using the latest technology in developing green buildings. We want to be at the forefront and we are demonstrating this around the world”.

Looking to Lend Lease’s previous work for examples, one can find little better example than Bluewater in Kent. Built during the late 1990s, the development is testament to how sustainability is as important as the materials used to build. Now Europe’s leading retail and leisure destination, Bluewater was built on the site of a former cement quarry site. Reclaiming this blighted location, Lend Lease was able to capitalise on this location, using the raw exposed chalk walls to provide a stunning frame for the modern shopping development located at its centre.

Though reclamation of the land at the Bluewater site represents a significant contribution to its sustainable philosophy, Lend Lease’s efforts have not stopped there. Bluewater was a founding member of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme and over one million trees and shrubs have been planted in the surrounding grounds to ensure development wouldn’t destroy local habitual areas. Furthermore, the Learning Shop located within Bluewater has managed to help nearly 22,000 people find employment, articulating the view that buildings can be more then just bricks and mortar.

Collaboration
Property investment and management are however hugely convoluted industries that, more often than not, create barriers to the successfully completion of projects. To ensure that a project delivers on its sustainable aims requires a mindset driven towards collaboration: “To get sustainability right means partnerships. It means collaborating like you’ve never collaborated before. Lend Lease has always been an organisation that works in partnership because our projects are often complex and large-scale, which we enjoy. It’s the way we’ve operated for years” Labbad points out.

Lend Lease’s recent digital broadcast project with BBC Scotland illustrates how collaboration can lead to impressive results. Working with around eleven sub-communities within the BBC, all planning to move into the new complex, the project needed to ensure all parties were listened too. With such a vast array of parties inputting into the design process, effective collaboration was an absolute necessity to guarantee the project finishing on time and on budget.

Lend Lease’s ongoing project in creating the new Media City in Salford also showed how sustainability can help overcome issues in the building process. The site is a former dockland bordering the Manchester Shipping Canal and Salford Quays, which posed potential problems with land contamination. This meant that greater testing was required than generally necessary to ensure the land was fit to build upon. Ultimately this led to the creation of a robust environmental system that judged the variability of contamination within the ground.

By pro-actively managing the reputational risk and reducing the amount of hazardous waste going to landfill, the system helped save huge costs for the client and ensured safe completion of Media City. “When you bring sustainability into the picture, you need to look at interacting with your clients, suppliers and with your end customers,” Labbad says. “You need to look at not only what you buy, but how you procure from the ground up. Where do your materials come from? And where do they go”? With this in mind, the supply-chain management of the project was carefully monitored, with all materials traced to their point of origin, and the project also trialled a tri-generation scheme; supplying power, chilled and warm water to the whole of the site.

Future prospects
So what does the future hold for the continued implementation of sustainability? In this genuinely cutting-edge time of architecture and an increasingly buoyant property market, the proverbial sky is most certainly the limit. “I think we are going to see a lot more melding of things like energy provision and traditional building,” Labbad says. “I think we will see further technological advances, but more than anything else we are going to see the consumer become much more informed around issues of sustainability and demanding choice. That is where green competition is really going to get interesting”.

With the future pointing increasingly to an interactive and connected world, the way we build will undoubtedly take account of this. Moving forward, Lend Lease is exploring the idea of not just sustainable buildings, but sustainable precincts that make use of shared utilities such as heat sources. And the size of the developments the company works on gives Lend Lease plenty of opportunities to try out new solutions. “Scale gives you the opportunity to do more. So when you are talking about 10,000 homes and mixed-use, you have a lot of opportunity to look at not just traditional building but things like energy provision, community use and how you develop something that’s more holistic then just bricks and mortar”.

These opportunities will no doubt be explored in the impending Elephant & Castle project recently taken forward by Lend Lease. A fifteen-year regeneration project, it will redevelop and rejuvenate this area of South London, opening up its true potential. And in doing so Lend Lease is already planning to leave a strong sustainable legacy in place, with the introduction of the Climate Positive Development Program which will attempt to transform the Elephant & Castle area into a ‘climate positive’ development. As such plans are to keep on-site C02 emissions to below zero, through the use of clean energy, efficient waste management and transportation and outdoor lighting systems.

The next couple of years will only see greater innovation and application within the field of sustainability. This is something the development industry can look on with immense satisfaction, as it leaves its reputation as a wasteful industry far behind itself. And with Lend Lease’s leading the way, this future will more than likely be here all the sooner.