Type: Article - Property Australia
Division: NAT
Date: Nov 99

Turning Green into Gold

By Sue Robinson

Karla Bell, one of Australia's best-known environmentalists, says the property industry has much to gain from carrying through on its commitment to environmental issues.

"I'm a broad-picture person and a detail person - I know that's one of my strengths." The speaker is Karla Bell, environment guru, perhaps most famous in Australia for her work in developing the "Green" part of the Green Olympics bid for Sydney. This is no 'tree hugger' hiding behind the unspecified but grand sentiments usually associated with environmentalism. This is a practical person who acknowledges that reforms grow where they are nourished by tangible reward; an achiever who traces broad causes down to the detailed effects for her clients in the property industry.
"I'm very interested in doing things. I'm not just interested in talking about doing things," she says. And it's clear that she believes the healthy future of the property industry depends on others matching words with actions too.

Lighting the Torch
Bell studied earth sciences at Macquarie University and spent "a couple of years in landscape architecture", as well as working in the environmental movement for around 15 years.
In 1991 she hired an architect, Rod Simpson, to enter a design, according to Greenpeace principles, for the Athletes Village Design Competition. In 1992 the Greenpeace-sponsored entrant was selected along with four others.  
The village design team was formed and given six months to come up with a final design according to Greenpeace criteria. Bell was one of the supervisors.
"The reason for the interest on behalf of government in the green aspect was because the then Minister for the Olympics, Bruce Baird, was responsible for the European IOC votes, in Sweden, Denmark and so on," says Bell. "As some of the strongest adherents to environmental protection in the world they were very interested in the concept of a Green Games."
As a result, in 1993 Bell presented the plan to the IOC Inquiry Commission on the Environment. It went very well. She says the head of the Inquiry Commission, Swedish IOC member Gunner Erickson, who was responsible for recommending to IOC members the merits of competing bids, stated that, "the most important aspect of Sydney's bid was the Green aspect".
So the village guidelines were expanded to the whole of the Olympic Games. "Even though there were controversial Greenpeace guidelines, such as the decision to avoid PVC and not use CFCs, HCFCs and HFCs, they were accepted by the Government in order to win the European vote," says Bell. These guidelines were the first in the world to include these substances and, she says the Green Olympics "is the first green building project anywhere in the world".
This was the start of a new phase in Bell's career. She became a private consultant and worked on the Mirvac/Delphin/Lend Lease Village study in 1994. Later, she provided environmental advice to the Olympic stadium and infrastructure works. She also worked for Stockholm in its bid for the 2004 Games, advising on the development of the environmental program, arena and athletes' village. Stockholm's bid was unsuccessful, but the project, says Bell, has become a European environmental showcase.
Since the Olympic bid, Bell feels we seemed to have given up, putting our environmental initiatives in the 'too hard' basket. Now various state governments in the US are contemplating the same issues and methods. California and New York are two examples. Europe is taking action too. "Many European nations started phasing out PVC in the early 1990s, eliminating ozone-depleting substances like CFCs and HCFCs and adopting energy efficiency. The Federal Swedish Minister for the Environment committed Sweden to a total phase-out of PVC in 1997."
Bell says necessity has often spawned a productively inventive approach.
"The best lighting people, in my experience, are from Sweden," she says. She points out that Australian buildings commonly use 10-12 watts per sq m per 100 lux. Swedish buildings have reduced this to 2-4 watts per sq m per 100 lux.
"They don't have much light, so they have become very good at lighting," says Bell. "The Germans are very good at waste. Because they had the problems with the Rhine in the 1970s, they have the toughest waste control laws in the world. The Brits have become the best in the world at natural ventilation."
Australia is quite good across a range of technologies and innovations, but fails to fully commercialise our creations, she says. We need to rectify this shortcoming fast, because, according to Bell, other nations aren't waiting around. "We've lost the momentum of the initiative. We were world leaders in renewable energy (such as solar, heat exchange or wind power) in the 70s and 80s and somehow we lost the plot. There was no follow-up," she says.
She adds that in another country, the hole in the ozone layer, for example, would be seen as a public health issue, with the government taking research results seriously, consulting the insurance industry and aiming for solutions. Here it is marginalised by being defined as "environmental".
"Everything gets reduced to 'tree hugging'," she says. "These are not 'environmental' issues. They are real national interest issues. And they should be on the agenda, along with social issues."

Setting the roles
Bearing in mind that international sentiment, backed up by treaties, is leading towards laws forcing developers and consumers to use ecologically kind products, the US, says Bell, is positioning itself to corner the ESD market. The German construction industry is contributing 3 per cent of profits for research and development in new technologies, and England, Sweden and other European countries are prepared to increase risk levels in order to experiment and try new technologies and ideas.
Bell says Australia doesn't even seem to realise there is an issue to address, and the property industry is not prepared to risk anything on new ideas unless someone else in some other nation has used them successfully first. She says the local attitude is encapsulated in the response to the Opera House project - where it was seen as an expensive, time consuming problem instead of an R&D opportunity, giving the city a chance to be architecturally distinctive.
We are already in the position of having to buy environmental technologies which originated in Australia and were sold to overseas concerns. Examples include Memtec and Solahart products. A new product, a window which can generate electricity, is currently attracting interest from Italian and Swiss companies. The inventor would like to keep it Australian owned if possible.
"It's time to support local environmental technologies - for government to support them through procurement policies," says Bell.
The production of greenhouse gases, either directly through manufacturing processes or indirectly through designing buildings and building systems which use up too much energy, carries an ultimate cost.
Recent international agreements centre around the concept that such emissions should be discouraged, either by making it profitable to reduce them or by making it costly to maintain or increase them. The preferred method varies according to national approach.
"There is a discussion in the developed nations about how best to reduce emissions," says Bell. Some want to regulate, penalising nations which contribute more than their share to the greenhouse effect, through some form of international carbon tax. Europe holds this regulatory view. Others take a more entrepreneurial approach, she says, seeing emissions trading as a way for corporations and countries to make a profit as well as reimbursing less developed nations for leaving their forested areas green and healthy. The US is ahead in this sort of 'market driven abatement' approach, says Bell.
According to Bell, Australia sees the regulatory approach as disadvantaging our country relative to its neighbourhood competitors which, being developing nations, will not be subject to the same penalties as Australia. The Government is supportive of trading. In a letter to Bell in April this year, Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, said: "The AGO (Australian Greenhouse Office) is examining the option of an early credit arrangement whereby companies could be rewarded for early action in reducing emissions, such as through building design and construction as you have proposed."
This international debate will have a definite downstream effect on the property industry because the carbon cost in a building is not insignificant. Bell says that in the US, 35 per cent of carbon dioxide gas is created in the materials, construction and use of commercial and residential buildings, adding that the figure would likely be similar in Australia. Buildings without energy-efficient systems create the most cost because of ongoing energy requirements.
"In a commercial building, the rough split is 20 per cent for materials and 80 per cent for the use," says Bell.
This makes the proposed carbon credits system relevant to commercial development. It could work this way:

This makes ESD relevant and motivates companies and governments to follow through on innovative ideas because of the potential extra profit in them. The use of energy saving systems, such as cogeneration and heat pump technology, then more than justifies any extra up-front cost and, in turn, allows the potential for economies of scale to reduce prices.
Climate change is becoming a global concern, particularly as it is manifesting itself in destructive weather patterns, says Bell. This concern is enshrined in international agreements, two of which are:

Other treaties are on the way. Earth Summit Three in 2002 will be discussing a treaty on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as dioxins, heavy metals and organochlorines which come from the manufacture of products like PVC. Bell predicts the formulation of an international treaty on water in the next few years and points out that the treatment of contaminants, such as asbestos, is likely to remain a national, rather than international issue.
Australia is hardly leading the world in the approach to contaminants. Bell says the US, for example, is 'proactive', listing products and substances which might create problems in future, and monitoring them. It also has around 800 contaminants on its EPA list. Australia has around 80. It's not that we produce or use a narrower range of substances. We are just more 'relaxed' about their possible ill effects.
"Those issues, I think will hit Australia in 2002-2004," says Bell.
This is not to say Australia is behind the world on all environmental issues. "We're good on things like whales," says Bell. "It doesn't stress us economically. We love whales."

Fitness Levels
Bell believes environmental legislation and practices in Australia need to be adjusted to encourage action rather than words. "Environmental legislation is weak on issues, it is discretionary, committing companies to 'consider' being environmentally responsible. There's 'investigate', 'think about', 'be a good corporate citizen'," she says. The result is environmental tokenism in the property industry.
Bell believes that Australia could only gain from a green approach to property. "We should do that in time for the Olympics. We should announce a commitment to a green building program. And that could be our Olympic legacy."
Bell is sceptical about Australian talk about becoming 'the clever country'. "Other countries don't talk about being clever - they just do it," she says.
"There's a lot of politics about what we're doing here, and we're dealing with an industry which is reluctant to change. People don't go to war over dodgy buildings."
But we need to change and fast, she says. "The issues facing the property industry are not the issues they were trained in." Such issues include the changing nature of work (telecommuting), environmental issues and social change, such as the ageing of the population. Tenant demands are changing. The industry needs to adapt, and according to Bell, it is failing to do so.
"What they are doing is tending, with some exceptions, to churn out the same product. The design development phase is being shortened, so designers don't have time to look at all options." The result? "They pull out what they used last time."
Making time to plan properly is important, Bell says. Without it, you cause: "a real problem for sustainability. But it's also a problem for the industry".
Designers may want green buildings, she says, but the environmental features are the first things ("the fancy stuff") to go when the constructors consider costs. And our industry is construction led.
Seven per cent of the cost of a building is in the upfront component where the constructors, engineers and architects all make their profit - 93 per cent of costs go into ongoing upkeep. The upfront people won't increase the upfront costs in order to reduce total costs (they say it comes off their profit to benefit people they don't have to deal with).
"If they just look at cost all the time, then the building that's designed badly will come out ahead," says Bell.
She also criticises the industry for failing to properly implement design competitions. The young talented designers who win aren't nurtured, she says. Rather, big architectural firms use the competitions as a source of ideas to poach. The French, by comparison, says Bell, have a mentoring program for young architects.
Her warning to the industry? Things will change, and it's better to be ahead of the trend than dragged along behind it.
"You have to have this commitment to good design, streetscape, good planning, curiosity about new technology, systems, and environmental technologies," she says.
"You have to get away from 'this is my piece of land and I'll build whatever I like'. You can't just go and build a monstrosity just because you've got the money."

The practical
Eco Sustainable Solutions Australia (ESSA) is Carla Bell and Associates' joint venture company with Norman Disney & Young and offers service in six areas: environmentally integrated interiors, sustainable tenant service, measuring and auditing environmental performance, information systems supporting environmental innovation, environmental awareness, knowledge and research and sustainable engineering solutions. The company can help you put in a roof garden, install energy-efficient HVAC, manage construction waste, reduce lighting bills, get realistic life-cycle costings, plan refurbishment, and carry out research.
ESSA has its own experts but also uses Bell's knowledge of the international scene to source overseas specialists for specific projects.