Building up a greener real estate industry

The Republic of Singapore is a highly urbanised state and much of its original vegetation has disappeared, though it still harbours a wide range of biodiversity. So, to preserve and improve its ecological heritage, over the past three years, the island has set out on a greening programme called City in a Garden. Close to 10% of the nation’s land has now been set aside for parks and nature reserves.

An important part of the green initiative is the Botanic Gardens, founded in 1859. Covering 74 hectares, the gardens act as a key civic and community space in Singapore, attracting over 4.4 million visitors per year.

In May 2013, the Gardens undertook to build the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG) Heritage Museum and CDL Green Gallery inside the gardens, with City Developments Limited (CDL), an international property and hotel conglomerate based in Singapore, endowing and constructing the building.

CDL has a long track record in green building projects and has undertaken green building innovations since the 1990s, creating Singapore’s first Eco-Condo, first Eco-Mall and also the first Carbon-Neutral development in the Asia Pacific region.

“In the 1990s, the building industry was considered to have caused a negative impact on the environment,” says Esther An, chief sustainability officer at CDL.

Besides being perceived as ‘destroying before constructing’, the building sector in Singapore is the third-largest contributor of carbon emissions.

“There is a real need for our industry to undertake greater environmental responsibility and mitigate the impact of our activities on the environment,” says An.

But building high-quality and sustainable developments requires more than having a few eco-friendly features within a property. As a major developer and landlord in Singapore, CDL saw the CDL Green Gallery project as an opportunity to help shape the practices of the real estate industry and encourage greater environmental and social responsibility.

“‘Conserving as we construct’ has always been our ethos,” says An.

The concept for the CDL Green Gallery, which is an extension of the garden’s SBG Heritage Museum, included making it Singapore’s first zero-energy gallery. To achieve this, the roof was clad in photovoltaic panels which harvest over 31,000 kWh of energy per year – more than the estimated energy required for the whole of the building’s operations. The design was also conceived to cause minimal disruption to the site with the use of two new eco-innovative features to Singapore – the first is a bio-material known as Hempcrete and the second, a prefabricated modular system.

Hempcrete is a mixture of hemp core, lime binders and water, and was used for the external wall cladding. This high thermal material is ideal for Singapore’s humid climate, says CDL, because it creates good indoor air quality, and it is also durable and naturally resistant to pests, mould, mildew and fire. At the CDL Green Gallery, there was also an aesthetic consideration as each feature Hempcrete wall was mixed and layered in different proportions in order to achieve natural-looking variations, a technique that CDL hopes one day to implement in larger-scale developments.

The gallery’s external structure was also installed using a prefabricated modular system which saw the steel components prefabricated and assembled in an offsite production facility, then hoisted by crane into position onsite. This process of installation took less than 24 hours and eliminated the massive wet works usually required in building developments. Because the panels are modular, they can also be broken down and re-used at a later date if required.

The East and West façades of the building also have an eco-feature in that they have been clad with green walls composed of butterfly-attracting plant species, while a green roof composed of a selection of drought-resistant plant species was incorporated in order to lower the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect around the building (where a metropolitan area becomes significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities). To finish off, inside, the gallery was fitted with energy-efficient LED lights and air-conditioning systems.

The end result was that the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) of Singapore accorded the CDL Green Gallery the Green Mark Platinum status – the highest tier applicable to green buildings in Singapore.

CDL celebrated 50 years in business in 2013 and the CDL Green Gallery was one of its gifts to the nation as part of its jubilee celebrations. The Gallery will feature botanical- or greening-related exhibits, which will be changed every six to nine months, and the first exhibition showcased Singapore’s greening journey.

However, there is another part to CDL’s gifts to the nation – My Tree House, jointly conceived by CDL and Singapore’s National Library Board (NLB). Billed as the World’s First Green Library for Kids, this was opened in the summer of 2013 in the children’s section of Singapore’s Central Public Library in the city’s Civic District.

“The aim is to cultivate children’s interest in environmental conservation through reading, discovering, and engagement in green activities, and nurture them to be environmentally-conscious adults,” says An.

A tree house built from recyclable materials forms the centrepiece of the structure and also includes energy-efficient LED lighting, refurbished bookshelves and carpets with green properties, while the canopy was created from over 3,000 recycled plastic bottles.
At My Tree House, children can interact with The Knowledge Tree, a shadow play wall, to learn about the environment and energy conservation, while the live Weather Stump tells them about the state’s temperature, rainfall and wind speed.

Around 30% of the library’s 45,000 books focus on green topics such as animals, plants, water and recycling, while fiction books, including fairytales related to the theme of the enchanted forest, make up the other 70%.

Besides doing its part to promote sustainable development with the CDL Green Gallery and My Tree House projects, CDL also does its part to ensure that its stakeholders, such as partners in its supply chain, deploy sustainable practices too. Its contractors undergo quarterly Environment, Health and Safety inspections in areas such as energy, water, waste management, safety, noise, workers’ welfare and public health management.

Moving forward, in addition to new developments, CDL is now in the vanguard of ‘greening’ existing buildings and in fact out of the 11 BCA Green Mark Platinum Awards it has received in 2014, seven are for existing buildings.

The firm sees green innovation and sustainable building methods as both the future of building and a business benefit. “My Tree House and the CDL Green Gallery both showcase our cutting-edge innovations in green development,” says An.

“This is good for our brand and our reputation as an industry leader in innovation and product quality, which may appeal to an increasingly large number of stakeholders, particularly those who are environmentally conscious and those who want to enjoy greater energy and water efficiencies in the future.”