Simon Wild, director, chief executive officer at Cundall Australia, has over 20 years’ experience in the design and analysis of ESD in buildings.
Recently, Cundall signed on as the world’s first consultancy to be formally endorsed as a One Planet Company by sustainability charity BioRegional.
Architecture & Design spoke to Wild about being a One Planet Company, changes to sustainability since he started Cundall in 2003 and why government needs to become more involved in sustainability.
Can you tell A&D about the One Planet Company? Why did you become involved with it?
One Planet Living has a practical vision of a sustainable world in which “people everywhere can enjoy a high quality of life within the productive capacity of the planet, with ample space remaining for wildlife and wilderness.” This acknowledges that everyone needs to reduce their impact without a detrimental effect to their quality of life, or in a business’s case, a negative impact to their business.
Cundall has committed to a journey which sets targets against 10 One Planet Living principles that cover a wide range of considerations. Cundall was already proactively reducing our business’s impact on the environment. However, this One Planet Living Action plan is pushing us to the next level. Just saying you are carbon neutral as a business is not enough anymore -- everyone recognises that being sustainable is more than just carbon emissions, so as businesses we must recognise that too.
You set up Cundall in 2003. What have been the most significant changes in the industry in terms of sustainability since then?
Nine years ago we opened to respond to a niche in the market of sustainability. Sustainable design is no longer a niche, it is now integral to most new developments and more recently many existing buildings. Sustainability in the property sector has been driven by many factors over the years. The most significant factors in Australia were the introduction of green benchmarking systems such as NABERS and Green Star, but also the government’s commitment early on that any new building they occupy had to meet minimum green standards. It is these two factors that really drove sustainable property forward in Australia.
As sustainability has become more engrained in the industry we have seen a greater awareness of what true sustainability means -- early on there was some greenwash being bandied around, but the industry has moved beyond this now. There is a great level of transparency and therefore integrity to sustainable buildings. In response to this Cundall are working with clients and others in the industry to understand their decisions better, we do this by challenging the design throughout the design process and pushing the team to think of sustainability and a cornerstone of the design not a box ticking exercise.
What do you think Australia could improve in terms of sustainability?
Australia is quite different from Europe in terms of sustainability, but the results are probably similar. Europe’s sustainability focus is driven from the various governments needing to respond to the fact that the European Union signed up for the Kyoto agreement, as such legislation and regulation have forced through the change. The building regulations in the UK, as one example, go way beyond our own building code in terms of energy and emissions. The result in the UK is the industry has to work out how to meet the requirements. This works well to create steady long term change.
In Australia, the changes that have happened have been market driven. The inherent and required competitive nature of organisations means that if sustainability is seen as a market need, the organisations within the property industry will respond by trying to being the greenest -- my 6 stars is better than your 5 stars mentality. This works well when the market is very active and buoyant (pre-GFC), but when the market isn’t as buoyant the drive for improvement tends to slow down. So the result is quick change, but very dependent upon market conditions.
At the moment, Australia needs some government commitment to sustainability to create harder legislation for the market to respond to in slower economic times such that when or if the market goes hell for leather again we will see some rapid changes like we did between 2003 and 2008.
What project are you most proud of and why?
Rouse Hill Centre is a visionary retail complex combining the world’s best practice sustainable initiatives and setting a new benchmark in regional shopping centres in Australia. We utilised many techniques of modelling and analysis to create a comfortable environment using less energy. This project saw a team who worked together with a client who wanted to achieve this exemplar sustainable project. The project has won many awards over the years and continues to be one of GPT’s most successful retail developments.
What is the greatest challenge facing the property industry in the next 12 months?
There are of course the obvious political and economic challenges but in terms of sustainability I would say the greatest challenge will be the regeneration of existing buildings, infrastructure and technology. As a country we have a lot already invested in our built environment, we have buildings, roads, rail, hospitals etc and they probably aren’t performing anywhere near where they could be in sustainability terms. We need to reconsider the value placed on regenerating existing assets. At the moment a new building likely creates more value than regenerating an existing one but a lot of resources are used and carbon emitted in the process. The carbon tax in theory would revalue this but so many industries are exempt that it won’t.
The industry also needs to impose a new challenge on itself. With Australia being market driven rather than government driven, the industry responds well to market challenges. In 2003-04 the advent of NABERS and Green Star for new buildings gave a challenge that the industry responded to and we can now see the great step change that was made because of that. But it hasn’t set itself a new challenge, maybe the advent of Green Star performance will be the catalyst for that change. Time will tell.
What is one thing you do in your spare time that people might not know?
Aside from being a father of three and of course a loving husband, I am now an avid blogger. It takes up a lot of my spare time, but I enjoy the process of increasing my own understanding of sustainability and communicating that in simple terms.
