Adapting Green Building Assessment Schemes to Reflect Laboratory Circumstances – The Experience of Britain's New BREEAM Higher Education Scheme
Peter James, Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) Project
Although many laboratories have been certified under existing schemes such as LEED® and BREEAM, there is a widespread feeling that they struggle to reflect the complexities of laboratory environmental impacts. This presentation describes how the incorporation of a number of laboratory-specific credits in a new version of the UK-based BREEAM scheme for universities has overcome this. The credits may also be applied to future assessments of non-university laboratories in the public and private sectors. The UK experience will be of relevance to people interested in the relationship between LEED and laboratories as
- It has been explicitly based on the Labs21 design philosophy (adapted for European circumstances)
- Green building assessment is rapidly internationalizing, making BREEAM and LEED alternative options in many countries.
The first section of this presentation will briefly describe the changing regulatory and stakeholder demands with regard to laboratory environmental performance in the UK and Europe, which have influenced the new BREEAM credits. These include targets for zero-carbon buildings over the next decade, and a new fume hood standard, BS EN 14175, which moves away from fixed ventilation norms in favour of a risk assessment approach, which is enabling fume cupboard face velocities to be safely reduced to a range of 60-80 feet per minute.
The second part of the presentation summarizes the growing evidence base about the energy and environmental performance of UK university and other laboratories that have influenced the new credits. This includes detailed energy benchmarking of over 100 UK university laboratories, in a range of different types, by the HEEPI project, a co-founder of Labs21 UK. Extremely detailed auditing of energy performance is also being undertaken in several laboratories.
The main section of the presentation describes the new credits. Two of these relate to fume cupboard volume air flows, with one credit for a safe reduction of 35 percent compared to current design norms, and another for a further reduction below this level. Other technical credit areas include:
- Achieving or bettering best practice fan power figures
- Grouping and/or isolation of high filtration/ventilation activities
- Energy recovery; grouping of cooling loads
- Free cooling
- Load responsiveness
- Diversity
- Room air change rates
Achieving any of these credits requires approval by the design team that safety is not compromised and, where they relate to ventilation, the carrying out a satisfactory risk-based assessment approach. There are also two consultation credits, with one tied to a Labs21-style early stage design workshop.
Biography:
Peter James is professor of environmental management at the University of Bradford and co-director of the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement project, a networking and technical guidance project which provides environmental support to British universities. HEEPI has worked with Labs21 in the U.S. to develop a small-scale British sustainable laboratory program, and has recently received funding for a larger scale initiative, in the UK and (it is hoped) the rest of Europe. Mr. James has published extensively on environmental accounting; green technology; and high performance buildings, and has been a member of the European Commission's Expert Groups on Environmental Technology, Information Technology, and Energy Efficiency.