How to rapidly meet environmental standards

Jim Gowan, design manager at Actavo | Building Solutions, explains how to rapidly meet environmental standards using modern construction methods. He has worked in the offsite and modular sector for over ten years.

Back in 1998, a government report ‘Rethinking Construction’ by Sir John Egan, recommended offsite construction was faster, safer, cheaper and higher quality.

As environmental standards such as BREEAM and Passivhaus continue to become more rigorous, offsite constructed buildings are leading the way in meeting those quality marks – a world away from their 1970’s predecessors. The key is starting right.

Design for life
You secure your BREEAM Excellence or Passivhaus standard at the design stage because it is planned in by engaging the whole community on what they want from the building.

With modular buildings, there are far fewer onsite deliveries, so you drastically reduce your impact on the local area during the construction process, as well as with carbon emissions.

Whether the building is modular or traditionally constructed, the performance of environmentally-friendly features are not affected. For example, a sunpipe, windcatcher, PV panel and ground or air source pump performs just as well in an offsite-constructed building as it does traditional.

Time out
Modular builds save time because they need considerably fewer weeks to deliver on programme, compared with traditional builds.

The more complex the building, the more time offsite construction methods save. Buildings are manufactured in controlled environments without exposure to the elements and with much easier-to-control and safer processes than a building site.

Doubling up
The crux of why modular is able to deliver greener buildings more quickly is because enabling works onsite can be carried out and foundations laid, while buildings are being designed and manufactured offsite.

Safe as houses
The risks of modular vs traditional construction are lowered by offsite construction taking far less time to build onsite which automatically means reduced risks of contact with the public. There are also fewer vehicle movements – both to and from the site.

Factory environments – in which modules are built – are much easier to control than building sites. These environments are easier to monitor, more efficient in their policies and protected from the elements which make modular less subject to the vagaries of weather-dependent processes which so often create havoc with traditional build programmes.

Building teams are also more protected from working at height because the design stage identifies jobs which can be completed while the modules are at ground level. Safer jobs score more environmental points.

Model builder
As an industry, we’re getting better at building better buildings – a trend set to continue, given the direction in which regulation is headed:

  • Planning is key to holistic performance – the two magic ingredients to the industry’s incessant drive to build safer, faster, cheaper and ever higher quality, are planning and design. BIM (building information modelling) – we work to Level 2 – is pulling everything together (your stakeholders’ opinions, optimising environmental performance, supply chain and identifying clashes) early in the construction process.
  • Government is leading the way – if you want to build a public building, you need to be fluent in BIM, CDM and modern methods of construction.
  • Standards are slipping upwards – as witnessed at Ecobuild in 2015 with the launch of the new BREEAM standards and the decrease in U values (lower means better insulation). Modular accommodates these changes more easily, as quality control is generally more rigorous and consistent in a factory than on a building site. Actavo | Building Solutions has achieved BREEAM ‘Excellent’ standards on a number of projects.