STORIES

Taking the top spot (twice!) at the MENA Green Building Awards

At ICD Brookfield Place, we’ve always set out to be more than just another typical office space. From the outset, we wanted to create an environment that redefines the traditional workplace and exceeds all expectations, with a particular focus on health, wellbeing and sustainability.

We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but we were especially delighted to have our efforts recognised not once but twice by the MENA Green Building Awards, winning both the Green Building Project of the Year award and the Healthy Spaces award.

We’ve been working towards winning awards such as these for a long time now. Just in the last 12 months, we achieved our LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum Certification, the highest rating awarded by the US Green Building Council for green building design, construction, operations and performance. We’re also the tallest and largest office building in EMEA to gain this certification – a significant milestone.

In these same 12 months, we saw a huge reduction in energy costs thanks to these green design principles. Our energy costs are reduced by 30% thanks to high-performance glazing and insulation designed to minimise heat gain, while our water use is reduced by a massive 48%, in large part due to efficient flow fittings and condensate water recovery.

All of this and more can be monitored within the office thanks to advanced building performance dashboard and analytics, helping us to optimise the performance of the building at all hours of the day. It’s this kind of intelligence and commitment to our green credentials that saw us take home the prestigious Green Building Project of the Year award.

The Healthy Spaces award focuses more on health and safety and employee wellbeing, and takes into account factors such as office layout, air quality, hygiene standards and employee facilities. We’re incredibly strong across all of these areas, and ICD Brookfield Place is actually the largest WELL health-safety rated office building in MENA. We maintain this prestigious rating by keeping all spaces clean and sanitised, providing essential health benefits and services and communicating our health and safety efforts to all workers in the building, to name but a few steps.

Air quality is also something we take extremely seriously – after all, what would a healthy space be without an abundance of clean air? As is expected with an office building based in Dubai, achieving high levels of air quality is trickier than normal, but we take extensive measures to ensure success. As well as using the aforementioned building performance dashboard to measure air quality 24/7, we’ve installed a high-spec ventilation system that uses top of the range MERV 13 filters to ensure only good, clean air is flowing through the building.

We recently put all of this to the test by conducting some indoor air quality testing, and found that ICD Brookfield Place exceeded the local and international air quality standards by 80%. That’s a huge result – and just one of the reasons why we emerged winners of the Healthy Spaces award.

From conserving energy and managing resources and waste, to environmental initiatives encouraged among tenants, we at ICD Brookfield Place create a mindset of shared responsibility. We’re delighted that the MENA Green Building Awards have recognised this, and we’re already looking ahead to see how we can continually improve what we do. Here’s to the future.