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Ground Floor, Collingwood Building, Black River Park, Fir Street, Observatory, 7925
Cape Town
South Africa

+27 82 462 5423

Misplon Green Building Consulting specialises in assisting property investors who are orientating their property portfolios towards “going green” and who need help in taking practical steps towards their goals.

Latest from Misplon

Filtering by Tag: Green Building

Growthpoint’s Greenfield Industrial Park achieves SA’s first industrial Green Star rating

Misplon

Growthpoint Properties’ Greenfield Industrial Park in Cape Town has been awarded South Africa’s first ever Green Star SA rating for an industrial property.

In a milestone achievement for green building in South Africa, Greenfield received a 4-Star Custom Industrial As-Built Green Star SA certification from the Green Building Council South Africa (GBCSA).

Growthpoint’s green building consultants for Greenfield, Sally Misplon from Misplon Consulting and Francois Retief from Sow & Reap, examined this opportunity further. Collaborating with GBCSA, they jointly developed a custom new build certification for the industrial facility, which is a progressive approach to ensuring more building types can be certified by the GBCSA. The custom process uses around 80% of existing Green Star SA tools making minor changes to allow application to other sectors for which tools have not yet been developed. To ensure robustness and relevance, the custom process goes through an independent peer review before it is finalised as a rating tool for the project.

The Greenfield project was a wonderful opportunity to apply this process, which proved successful due to, among other things, the Green Star experience that Misplon and Retief added to the process.

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tags Green Building, 4 Star, Industrial Building, Greenfield, Growthpoint, African first, GBCSA

Upper Eastside Hotel’s Green Transformation

Misplon

Cape Town’s Upper Eastside Hotel, owned by Spear Properties has achieved a 5-Star Existing Building Performance (EPB) Green Star SA rating.

Always striving for exceptionality, Upper Eastside, which is a franchised Hilton Hotel and the first DoubleTree in South Africa, started implementing greener policies over the last six years. This made for a relatively smooth Green Star SA submission process and although originally targeting a 4-Star EBP rating, achieved a 5-Star rating straight out of the starting blocks.

Management centric

EBP is designed to reward facility management practices, ensuring that a building operates optimally. Where projects have achieved a base building rating it recognises management actions that ensure the building operates as intended by the design. For all projects targeting EBP, the main actions require auditing installed performance, monitoring on-going usage and taking corrective steps to remedy inefficiencies. In essence, it rewards best business practice on an on-going operational basis and the certification is renewable every three years.

Sally Misplon, green building consultant appointed to execute the Green Star SA certification submission, agrees with hotel general manager Francois Steyn that for buildings that pre-date the current trend in green infrastructure, “achieving EBP certification can be a greater challenge”. Older existing buildings are coming off a lower performance base, which can limit the opportunity for effective intervention and make achieving that targeted star rating a costly exercise.

In the case of the Cape Town Upper Eastside Hotel, Misplon conducted audits of lighting lux levels, carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO1) and thermal comfort in each and every room, and facilitated audits of green cleaning products and transport usage. Consequently, management plans were established for maintenance, landscaping, cleaning product procurement and alternative transportation – and the effects of implementation are noticeable.

 

 

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categories Existing buildings, Green Hotels
tags Green Building, existing building accreditation, 5 Star Green Star, Existing Buildings, Sally Misplon