TFT is a member of the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC), the Irish branch of the global Green Building Council community of over 80 groups promoting sustainable building around the world.

IGBC is now Ireland’s leading authority on green building best practices with a network of over 300 member organisations with influence across the entire built environment industry.

With this membership, TFT has broadened its long-running partnership with the UK Green Building Council, including work on advancing industry knowledge around:

• Embodied ecological impacts
• Circular Economy principles in construction
• Social value and community engagement

Though these initiatives remain relevant tools for our industry, Ireland’s policy and regulatory frameworks present different routes to sustainable building in the region than are used in the UK.

The IGBC also leads a number of ground-breaking projects providing proof of concepts and showing the way forward for transformative changes in the Irish property and construction market:

• Home Performance Index (HPI) certification: a scheme for sustainable housing and planning at local and national levels.

• Full building Life Cycle Analysis (LCA): IGBC is raising awareness about embodied carbon using an EPD Ireland database to provide a national platform for suppliers and manufacturers to upload their Environmental Product Declaration Certificates. In addition, it is developing a national generic construction database provides a store of Irish building information to be used in early-stage building-level LCA

• Carbon Design Tool: giving designers a simple way to calculate the carbon impact of their designs.

• Piloting a Construction Materials Exchange: this scheme demonstrates a user-friendly system for the reuse of construction materials that would otherwise enter the waste stream.

Kevin Brannigan, Head of TFT’s Dublin office, said:

“We know leading building owners and occupants count sustainability as a top priority, but we still find inconsistent understanding of how to achieve these goals or how organisational ambitions are met in different regions.

So partnering with the IGBC is a great way to combine TFT’s understanding of sustainable, valuable and resilient buildings with the IGBC’s leading research, education and industry engagement work. Together I look forward to elevating standards and knowledge across the board.”

Kevin Brannigan, Head of TFT's Dublin office

Find out more about the IGBC here.