Building Towards the Future
Buildings are a vital part of everyday life; odds are that at this very moment you are sitting inside your home, office, or even a coffee shop reading this blog post. The reality is that you spend most of your life indoors as buildings are the backdrop of everyday life, including most social interactions and settings for economic development. As real estate developers, we are fortunate to be involved in such an integral part of adding to the essential frameworks of a city and society's functionality. We understand that with this comes real responsibility as we are quite literally in a position to shape the world of tomorrow as we are reaching a critical moment in time where everyone must do their part in creating a greener world.
According to the World Green Building Council, 39% of all CO2 emissions come from buildings and construction. This means that we are part of an industry that, as a result of developing and bettering our cities, we are a big part of the problem. As a company that values sustainability at its core, we acknowledge that we are part of the problem. We value the environment around us and believe it is our duty as developers to contribute both to the advancement of a city as well as the sustainability of our planet in creating a greener world that will be able to sustain generations to come. Because of this, we have embraced the idea of green building in all of our projects. A green building is the idea that a developer can build Real Estate to minimize the adverse effects of construction and positively impact our environment once completed, such as having energy-saving technologies.
The concept of Green Building starts at the very beginning of the building processes at the design stage. The first step towards sustainable building is picking materials for construction that are non-toxic, ethical, sustainable, and can have positive impacts on the surrounding environment. In our most recent project, novAmpere, which was completed earlier this year, this strategy was adopted early on. As a way to cancel out our carbon emissions that came with the construction of the apartment complex, we enlisted the help of professionals that were conducting research and working with different materials to create products that were able to have a positive impact on the natural environment. The result was a new technology called i.active TECNO cement by italcementi that is able to absorb the CO2 from the surrounding air; estimates say that it can remove the pollution of 54 cars running on petrol and absorbs the same amount of CO2 as 243 trees. During the construction phase, consideration for the eviroemnt is crucial for minimizing wastage, getting rid of waste responsibly, and responsibly using water and electricity. Finally, the last and maybe most important step would be to incorporate technologies that make the building's lifespan as green as possible and create a high quality of life for future occupants. These would include incorporating renewable energies such as solar panels to generate electricity and photovoltaic technologies for heating purposes. Returning to our most recent project, novAmpere was designed so that future residents could be guaranteed a high quality of life through maximum performance and smart consumption of resources. An example would be the geothermal energy included in the project, a clean and renewable energy source.
At its core, building sustainably entails creating an environment where one can live in harmony with nature so as to ignite these values in the people entering and leaving these buildings. For us, incorporating nature and greenery into our projects is vital as we believe that it is imperative in contributing to the health and well-being of occupants, as well as bringing out the love of nature we all have. While we are not there yet, our goal moving forwards is developing a property from start to finish producing zero emissions. While this may be an ambitious goal, it is one we believe is imperative to achieve if we want to create a world we can be proud to leave to our future generations.
The white pillars have the ability to absorb as much CO2 as 243 trees.