Environmental sustainability at the University of Manchester
As some of you may have already seen, the University of Manchester, the biggest campus based university in the UK, recently launched a procurement process for a £250m engineering campus, the single largest construction project ever delivered at the university.
The new site will form part of a ten year campus masterplan which will cost £1billion and be delivered over a six year period, with construction works phased over approximately four years. As part of the approved Estate Strategy 2012, the new Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD) will relocate and consolidate all academic accommodation from the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) site and North Campus into its existing Oxford Road site.
The university has put environmental sustainability at the heart of its strategy and its vision is by 2020 to be among the top 25 sustainable universities in the world. To support its sustainability plan, all capital projects must develop a set of specific environmental sustainability performance targets which will be tracked by a university appointed environmental sustainability advisor who will regularly review and monitor the targets throughout the lifetime of the project.
After a two stage selection process, I am really pleased that Buro Happold has been appointed as the environmental sustainability advisor for the MECD project. My role for the next six years of the project will be to assist both the estates and the project team (yet to be appointed) in achieving this vision. I will be tasked with coordinating and managing the delivery of the university’s sustainability strategy across various stages of the project including target setting, monitoring and leading the implementation of a low carbon and future proof strategy. I will also be responsible for water conservation, waste reduction and other themes such as construction innovation, cross-fertilised research and innovative teaching programmes together with the university’s academic staff.
Buro Happold also has other related appointments at the university including a carbon management plan for the whole campus and we are the workplace consultant for MECD with Idea as the lead consultant. This client side role for the key capital projects places us in a unique position to advise on innovative sustainable solution; one of which is the somewhat controversial suggestion to apply carbon trading between its different schools to provide the incentive for driving spatial, revenue and carbon efficiency without restraining the growth strategy. For example, the university is constructing a new National Graphene Institute to exploit graphene, the world’s thinnest material which was discovered by two of the university’s scientists subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010. Carbon emitted from the new Graphene Institute will have to be offset by the energy savings from other facilities and the use of low carbon and renewable technologies.
I’m really looking forward to investigating these challenges and helping the university to move towards their 2020 goal. I’ll update you on how the projects are moving forward. If you would like to find out more about this project, please feel free to contact me.
