Green Industry: CTP Leader in BREEAM Certification

CTP’s office developments are market leaders in sustainability. Tower II at Spielberk was the first building outside the UK to be certified BREEAM Outstanding—the highest rating available—for overall sustainability. The first buildings at Vlněna have already been certified BREEAM Excellent. For Building I, we are aiming for BREAAM Outstanding. We are also in the process of having all buildings certified Gold under the international WELL standard, which ranks workplaces based on their positive impact on the well being of the people working there.

We have taken our best practices at our office developments and applied them to our industrial parks and buildings. In 2016 we began building all our industrial buildings to be certifiable according to BREEAM specifications. To date, CTP is the market leader in the Czech Republic with 18% of all BREEAM certified-buildings. In 2017, we took the decision ourselves to certify our entire Czech portfolio according to BREAAM standards. By end 2019 we will have completed 17% of our Czech portfolio, with the remainder to be completed in 2020. We are also on plan to certify our Romanian, Hungarian and Slovak portfolios during 2020.

To achieve this, we work closely with the BRE organisation in London so that our White Book—the book of standards that defines all of the technology and processes used in the construction and refurbishment of our buildings—is aligned with current BREEAM standards, thus making the certification process faster and smoother.
As standards and technologies change over time, we continually seek ways to improve the technologies used in our White Book. For example, we are currently looking into a new variant of facade cladding called ‘quad core’ that meets our stringent fire code requirements. More interestingly, it’s not a mineral wool product. Rather, it’s a fire resistant, highly insulating, foam-filled product—not PIR or PUR—and safer on smoke emissions, too. The benefit of this is much higher U-values, which means much higher thermal insulation.

Another area of interest is IoT technology embedded into building management systems and lighting controls. We are moving towards a fully cloud-based solution that enables our service desk to monitor and control our industrial parks from Prague HQ.

We are also working on a progressive update plan to prepare our buildings for upcoming EU climate change legislation, which is expected to be strict. We do this by simulating a model building and adjusting the building fabric, MEP and glazing properties until we reach a performance level we are comfortable with, which we then set as the target for new design. This is an on-going process and represents a balance between investment cost, benefit and operational efficiency. We are currently in the process of a design update.

Other developments include rolling out PV panels as part of our standard for all buildings and the deployment of a next-generation BMS matrix which, when finished, will connect all technologies within the building through one system (including solar in the future).