Delivering Sustainable Buildings: Savings and Payback, Office Case Study for BREEAM UK New Construction 2018

Delivering Sustainable Buildings: Savings and Payback, Office Case Study for BREEAM UK New Construction 2018, was written by Christopher Ward (BRE) and Adam Mactavish (Currie & Brown) and published by BRE in 2020.

BREEAM is the leading sustainability assessment and certification scheme for the built environment. The aim of the BREEAM schemes is to encourage continuous performance improvement and innovation by assessing developments against a broad range of requirements that go beyond standard practice. BREEAM rated developments are more sustainable environments.

This BRE Briefing Paper follows on previous work BRE has undertaken with Currie & Brown in 2014 and 2017 on the cost implications of achieving BREEAM UK New Construction ratings of ‘Very Good’ and ‘Excellent’ for a model office building. These previous studies challenged the perception that sustainable buildings are inevitably more costly to build, and added to the growing evidence base demonstrating the low costs of achieving greater sustainability.

The latest study updates the previous cost models for the office building case study to reflect current construction costs and the updated requirements introduced by BREEAM UK New Construction 2018.

The Briefing Paper concludes that:

For both ‘Very Good’ scenarios, the BREEAM related capital cost uplifts over the baseline building’s overall construction costs are less than 0.25%.
For the two ‘Excellent’ scenarios, the capital cost uplifts are less than 0.75%.
The updated requirements in BREEAM UK New Construction 2018 have had very little impact on the additional capital costs of achieving ‘Very Good’ or ‘Excellent’ ratings.
The savings from the energy efficiency improvement measures required to achieve ‘Excellent’ ratings quickly payback the additional capital investment.