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More space, less carbon: how we moved office without the waste

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Neil Granger

Neil is Head of Sustainability, based in TFT's Edinburgh office. He has over 25 years of experience in building services, sustainable design and technical management for domestic and international projects across a number of sectors.

Neil has undertaken several framework lead roles for building services engineering services, with experience in both public and private sectors. He has also led individual projects out of these frameworks, both as a design manager and technical lead, including new academies for Aberdeenshire Council and global manufacturing facilities for General Electric.

Emily Baigent

Emily is based in TFT’s Edinburgh office and sits across the Energy & Carbon and Sustainability teams. Her project experience covers a range of commercial property types for services relating to all aspects of energy & carbon reduction, including net zero strategy, and sustainability at all stages of an asset's life.

In the time since joining, she has contributed to the production of publications including the RICS iSURV Whole Life Carbon update and BE News. As a Scottish Property Federation (SPF) Futures member, Emily also sits on the Sustainability and Building Design Committee in Scotland.

Outreach is an important aspect of her work as she is committed to LGBTQIA+ allyship, encouraging women into STEM and the construction industry, and introducing the world of surveying and sustainability to a wider demographic of young people.

This equates to around 144 kgCO2e/m2.This saving is significantly below the 312 kgCO2e/m2 LETI target figure [1] and is the equivalent of flying 500 times between Edinburgh and London City Airport.

As our team in Edinburgh grew, we knew we’d soon need to up-size our office space. But we didn’t want to upsize our carbon footprint in the process. Instead, we trialled a more sustainable way to relocate.

The typical Cat A fitout is a bit of a dirty secret in our industry. They are responsible for tonnes of carbon emissions and material waste because they are routinely installed and removed as tenants come and go in offices, often to be replaced with a slightly newer version of what came before. But breaking the standard practice of the fit-out-strip-out cycle is not straightforward, especially when case studies for its success can be few and far between.

So we became our own test subjects, using our office move as an opportunity to try to do things a bit differently. By retaining what we could from the previous tenants and working with both our new and old landlords, we managed to save around 41 tonnes of CO2 during our move. This equates to around 144 kgCO2e/m2. This saving is significantly below the 312 kgCO2e/m2 LETI target figure  and is the equivalent of flying 500 times between Edinburgh and London City Airport.

The good news is, this process didn’t take a radical feat of engineering, cutting-edge materials or an expensive team to pull off. It took some planning, logistics and negotiations between cooperative landlords and tenants. The even better news is that it brought benefits to all parties.

As with all new things, we have learned some valuable lessons during our move. Some parties were more amenable to a new dilapidations process, and we had to work to bring other parties who had no experience of a greener procedure and were resistant to change.

Our saving also shows that significant action is not just for big corporate occupiers. We hope that SMEs will take on board this case study and its learnings to make similar cost and carbon savings when they relocate in the future.

Considering SMEs make up 99.9% of the companies in the UK, there is great scope for all of us to change best practice, making it the new standard practice as we evolve into an increasingly sustainable, responsible, industry.

The process we used can be simplified down into “DNA”: desire, negotiate, agree. This applies to all parties, across the new and old premises whilst relocating:

Here's how we approached our new premises:

• Desire. What does this building already have that we want? Evaluate the furniture, fixtures, equipment and overall fitout, then draw up a list of what you could use or gain some benefit from.

• Negotiate. Open communication with the existing tenant and agree what they are prepared to sell or leave, and what they are going to be removing. Give them time to agree with their landlord about what is to be left in the building during their dilapidations process.  

• Agree. Decide with the landlord and departing tenant to allocate the liability for the retained parts of the fitout, considering the type of lease being undertaken (FRI, IRI, etc). Agree a price for the new fitout, and then exchange.

This has the advantage of relying on open, quality communication which helps to mitigate the usually adversarial process for the exiting tenant as they enter into dilapidations negotiations with the landlord.

For our old premises, the process looked like this:

• Desire. Would a prospective new tenant want any of our existing fitout? Would they, or the landlord, be willing to take on the liability for our equipment?

• Negotiate. Agree what is to be removed, what can be retained, and what the landlord or a prospective new tenant would be happy with in the space.

• Agree. Settle financially between the three parties for the costs of the fitout and complete the dilapidations process.

This has three major benefits.

Firstly, we reduced our dilapidations liability for a property that requires less remediation. Secondly, we got paid for a fitout that would otherwise have ended up in a skip or recycling facility. Thirdly, we are more incentivised to maintain our equipment and ensure it serves a full useful life, so that we may sell it with our fitout at the end of our tenancy.

The exiting tenants in the new premises benefitted too. They also reduced their dilapidations liability, earned money from a fitout that is usually costly to remove, and have saved themselves from a long adversarial dilapidations process. No elements of their fitout had served its full life, making a standard dilapidations process in this space a significant waste of carbon. Meanwhile, we did not need to pay an as-new price for a quality fitout that was less than three years old.

Our new office is larger than our previous one, so we retained all the furniture we had and then contacted a local supplier who has made us new tables from reclaimed scaffold boards, lowering the carbon intensity of the new furniture. There are a few new pieces of furniture in the office as well, however, significantly less than there otherwise would have been.  

We have saved 41 tonnes of carbon whilst moving in, of which 9.8 tonnes was saved from our existing office equipment. We are looking to continue to minimise our footprint by keeping our operational cost (financial and carbon) low.

Now that we’re in and settled, our team of in-house engineering specialists are helping us lower our operational carbon too. The whole team is being upskilled about using passive measures to regulate office temperature and generally to reduce the demand on mechanical systems in the long run.

When moving, there are considerations to be made about logistics, liability, and cost. Making these work in a different way means broadening one’s perspective on the standard convention of what ‘value’ is. Value should consider more than just money and begin to reflect the carbon associated with what is being purchased too.

That means thinking about your workspace fitout not just as a depreciating asset with a residual monetary value, but as a store of upfront carbon investment which is to be paid off over time. The amount of carbon embodied into an item may not be reflected in the cost, so cheap items can be carbon intensive, but that doesn’t mean that only premium items are low carbon. It just means that we should be investigating our processes and decisions in a bit more detail.

If you’d like to reach out to us to talk more about creating a more sustainable dilapidations process, then please get in touch with Neil Granger or Emily Baigent about how we can help you.

You can read a write-up of our office move as a Sustain RE case study, here.

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