Sustainability is golden! - Published on Friday 27 Jan 2012 at 15:09:27
Keepmoat Homes scooped Gold in the Sustainable Developer of the Year category at the prestigious What House? Awards.
The honour is reward for a big drive to become one of the greenest developers in the UK and comes as a result of a company wide effort led by Project Manager for Business Improvement, Mike Croft and Sustainability Manager, Stacey Chappell.
Measures taken included replacing traditional site cabins with modern, double glazed, highly insulated, temperature controlled eco-units with self closing doors and low energy lighting managed by sensors to avoid waste.
Sales offices and show homes are also being overhauled. The garages in which the sales teams work are now fitted with additional floor, wall and roof insulation while the adjacent show homes benefit from low energy sensor lighting and photovoltaic panels on the roof to provide energy.
In addition, training and energy awareness sessions are staged with all staff to eliminate the human factor such as windows being left open in cold weather or doors propped open when things are being delivered.
This led to Keepmoat Homes becoming the first UK housebuilder to operate an Energy Management System that complies with the requirements of BS EN 16001 for the acquisition of land and the design, construction and sale of residential buildings. It is also ISO 14001 accredited, setting demanding targets to reduce energy, water consumption and carbon footprint by 2012.
The What House? Awards – now in a 30thyear – celebrate outstanding achievement in the house building industry. This is what the judges said about Keepmoat Homes.
“From a strategic level right down to on-site policies, Keepmoat Homes has demonstrated a commitment to sustainability. At a board level the Management Action Group works to examine every aspect of the company’s work in the context of sustainability and has formulated a series of policies including: a Sustainability Policy; a Climate Change Policy and a biodiversity policy, while also producing a Home User Guide for all customers to encourage environmental responsibility.
“From board level to senior managers to contractors, Keepmoat is raising awareness of sustainable issues and working on developing sustainable solutions to solve them.
“Materials with a low embodied impact are preferred and recycled aggregate is used where possible. At site level, innovative measures are being taken to improve the performance of site cabins, including a fabric specification equivalent to Levels 3 and 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH).
“Furthermore, Keepmoat is constructing two homes to CSH (November 2010) levels 5 and 6 to be certified under
