Environment Policy
Whilst public safety and confidence in our designs underpins all our work, sustainability forms the backdrop. Against today’s imperative for CO2 mitigation, resource conservation and pollution reduction, our environmental policy provides a mechanism to continuously improve our performance.
There are four parts to our policy:
1. A carbon neutral office
2. Lowering the carbon footprint of staff
3. Providing our clients with sustainable designs
4. Pondering the ‘philosophy’ of sustainability.
1. A carbon neutral office There are five initiatives:
a) Lowering energy consumption. One staff member is appointed to determine our annual consumption of electricity, and to reduce this by 10% each year. This will be mainly achieved by ensuring that all computers and their screens are turned off each night, that lights are only used when needed and that dishwashing use is minimized. Currently that staff member is Liam Adler and he will produce 3-monthly reports detailing usage and savings.
Future initiatives are that our social club will consider how to reduce energy consumption in our planned social outings; and we will begin to put pressure on our building owner to reduce the overall footprint of energy use and consumption.
b) Car usage The nature of our site work requires much local travel. We currently use 8 cars – a car/staff ratio of 1:2. While we are looking for ways in the longer term to reduce this ratio, we have currently adopted the following approaches:
i. Purchase of hybrid or low petrol use (less than 7.5l/100km) cars. We already have one hybrid Prius, and future purchases will embrace the newer hybrid/electric technologies.
ii. We have joined Green Fleet, which offsets our petrol usage by tree planting. This is only an interim measure until greener responses can be put in place.
iii. Using trains for city meetings and inspections. This is also a very significant cost saving due to parking rates.
iv. Exploring the possibility of car pooling to travel to work and encouraging all of us to more fully embrace public transport.
c) General Consumption This has been instigated during the 2008/09 downturn mainly as a cost saving measure, but is very effective in reducing wastage of all materials, such as paper, stationary, photocopying etc. It should be continued even when cost reduction is not a priority, because it is a simple measure that saves resources across all aspects of our work.
d) New Technologies We will keep up to date and embrace new electronic means of production, communication and distribution of our work. This will include Skype, Revit, full use of email for data transmission and storage. This reduces courier and postal usage and all the energy expenditure that this involves.
e) Paperless Office. We are working towards ensuring that ALL of our documentation is stored electronically. We have a target date of January 2010 for our paper filing system to be fully discontinued. As of April 2009 we are half-way there and with the new Synergy software which enables us to store emails, we are on-track.
2. Lowering the carbon footprint of staff
We are commencing a program that will encourage all us to engage in an annual assessment of our individual carbon footprint in our own homes. There are several quick scoring tools that can calculate our CO2 output by measuring such things as number people in the family, number of cars, overseas trips, use of rainwater, public transport, recycling, composting etc. We will be asking each staff member to carry out this assessment and to try to reduce their environmental score by 10% each year. There will be an annual prize of $100 gift voucher for the greatest reduction - and maybe a booby prize for the poorest achievement. This is planned to be a light-hearted but effective approach to a serious issue.
3. Providing our clients with sustainable designs
Structural engineers walk a fine line between code compliance on one side and structural size minimization on the other. They can never stray over the edge of public safety and their skill is to design as narrow a path as possible. A too-wide path makes for a comfortable but costly design, and a too-narrow path does not allow any room to manoeuvre. We don’t actually always stay on this path, because with our multiperspective view we often take our designs into new and innovative areas – safely and economically.
At Partridge Partners we are also aware that:
sustainability derives from longevity
longevity is bestowed by robustness
robustness comes from a flexible design
flexibility comes from inventiveness
inventiveness comes from a broader vision.
So we do not doggedly pursue the very cheapest design, but we engage with our clients to work towards a longer-term design, that will be both sustainable and economic. We achieve this in part by providing solutions that are more structurally robust and so minimize future maintenance needs. We also seek to provide designs that can be more architecturally flexible to allow for possible future modifications. We endeavour to anticipate structural solutions that can endure.
We have produced a work-through document called The Environmental Specification Process (ESP) which is basically a checklist of important issues for each member of the consultant team to consider in the design and documentation of their component of a project. This has proved to be a very effective tool and leaves an auditable trail of the sustainable decisions that have been made and implemented.
And in all this we work together with our clients and architect colleagues on attributes such as planned life of the structure, life-cycle costing, future potential, solar gain, thermal sinks, stack effect, night venting, material properties etc. This means that our involvement can go well past structural matters and can benefit the overall value of the project
3. Pondering the ‘philosophy’ of sustainability
Reducing one’s footprint on this planet comes down largely to personal choice and personal motivation. What can inform us here better? What can be a truer guide for these often contentious and sometimes conflicting issues? What can provide us with the necessary motivation to take decisions that could well lead to behavioral and life-style changes?
At Partridge Partners, we are interested in exploring these questions; in the generation of discussion, ideas and rational debate. For this reason we have produced three papers:
The Sustainability of Beauty which argues that a more ‘wholesome’ architectural design can so satisfy the human psyche that we are not driven to constant alterations and additions. Can beauty of design by itself bestow longevity?
Sustainability and Poverty which seeks to explore the relationship between first-world ‘greening’ of our lifestyles and third-world extreme poverty. How can we expect to maintain our current consumption (which is currently using 1.3 planets, and set to rise to 2.0 planets by 2030) in the face of 68,000 deaths per day from malnutrition?
The BES Index. A quantitative analysis of the embodied energy, resource depletion and inherent pollution for 21 of the most common building materials and a numerical comparison of typical domestic building assemblies.
These papers are available on our web site and we welcome comment and debate.