As an auspicing society of Melbourne’s World Sustainable Building 08, our CRC for Construction Innovation enjoyed significant profiling over the four days of the event. Over 2000 delegates attended this prestigious sustainable building conference last month, co-chaired by our own CRC Chair, John McCarthy.
In his opening address, the Honourable Peter Garrett, Australia's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts launched our environmental impact ‘calculator’ for commercial properties,
LCADesign, describing it as the software that ‘will provide industry with the information necessary to design buildings that are ecologically and economically sustainable’ .
LCADesign’s commercial release comes at a time where the market for greener building is undergoing considerable and rapid growth. The software enables users to measure and compare eco-preferred and conventional product options, and the impact of design improvements across human health, ecosystem damages, resource depletion, and carbon impacts. The software’s release comes just as the Construction Forecasting Council has announced that an estimated $267 billion worth of non-residential stock is to be built over the next 10 years. This high profile launch by the Minister also gained coverage for
LCADesign in the
Australian Financial Review.
In addition to the hundreds of papers, poster sessions and trade displays (
LCADesign among them), the conference featured more than 20 forums, including our own ‘Integrating and innovating for sustainability’. This session examined how to maximise opportunities for innovative, integrated processes in the planning, design, delivery/construction and management (i.e. whole-of-life) of our built environment, and in so doing improve the efficiency and sustainability of the industry. In this standing-room-only event, our speakers in Bruce Rauhe
(Director, Sustainable Design and Engineering, Walt Disney Imagineering, California), Peter Bowtell (Principal, Arup) and
Tony Stapledon (Group Sustainability Manager at Leighton Contractors) engaged an international audience of over 300.
Their talks delivered on the topics of “Imagineering: Inventing, simulating and delivering new technologies to improve the sustainability of the built environment”, “Technology and tools improving sustainability in structural engineering” and “Building a sustainability culture’. The lively discussion session and ensuing questions and comments afterwards provided strong testament to the relevance and high calibre of the forum and the content presented. (
Presentations available for for review on our website)
The impressive attendance at SB08 demonstrates the national and international commitment of industry to sustainability and further supports the momentum and traction being gained by our existing CRC towards securing a new Sustainable Built Environment centre and a mission of “transforming infrastructure and buildings”.
Visit
Construction Innovation’s
SB08 page to view speaker presentations and photos from the event.
