BRE shares lessons on Olympic sustainability

BRE, the UK’s leading building research body, has published the findings of two projects to examine the achievement of high levels of sustainability on key venues at the London 2012 Olympic Park in a new report, BREEAM and the Code for Sustainable Homes on the London 2012 Olympic Park.

“When London won the right to host the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the bid team pledged to treat sustainability as a major priority, to establish sustainability benchmarks for the development of future Games facilities and to take a lead in best practice that others in UK construction would follow,” said Neil Paterson, one of the authors of the report.

These projects aimed to contribute to the “learning legacy” for the Games and to share the lessons learned about sustainable design and construction more widely with the UK construction industry.

London 2012 will be the first summer Games to map its complete carbon footprint over the entire project, and it is setting new standards of sustainability – not just environmentally, but socially and economically.

The BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) is a well-established means of assessing the sustainability of a range of different types of new and existing buildings.

A bespoke version was developed for the Games with the intention of driving reductions in environmental impacts, and applied in the design and construction of the permanent venues, including the Velodrome and Aquatics Centre. This was the first time that assessments were created and used for major sports stadia.

The Olympic and Paralympic Village is the first large-scale, high-density, high-rise scheme to be developed to Level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes. As such, it presented the opportunity to learn important lessons about how to apply the Code on this scale, which in turn will drive improvement in the standard.

“The best way for the construction industry to maximise the effectiveness of the Code is for it to fully adopt the philosophy and believe in what it is trying to achieve,” said Robin Brylewski, co-author of the report.

“This will happen through engagement with the workforce so that it does not feel like it is simply following orders but that it has some input into the way the industry evolves.”