Knowledge Zone

Sustainability as a concept, often times, can be accused of being a buzzword associated with greenwashing amongst large corporations.

Most companies nowadays will have sustainability policies as standard. But when do they stop being just guidelines, and start showing actual progress?

We recently took a trip to Trinity College in the heart of Dublin’s south inner city, where Stuart McIntosh, General Manager of Sirus, showed how sustainable policy becomes sustainable practice.

He will speak at our upcoming free FM webinar on the Implementation of Sustainability in FM.

Picture: Bernard Mac Oscair with Stuart McIntosh at Trinity College Dublin. By Verónica Aguilar.

Sirus is a company dedicated to the supply of technology that allows buildings and workspaces to be run in the most efficient manner possible.

One of their clients is Trinity College Dublin (TCD), which is increasing the efficiency of its main campus in Dublin 2.

A lot of the work Sirus has done on the TCD campus involves identifying water chillers that have reached the end of their life cycle, and replacing them with more efficient models, a change, Stuart reveals, that saves TCD a great deal of money.

“The replacement of about one megawatt cooling here has accrued to approximately €12,000 a month in pure cost reduction.”

Monetary gain is not the only benefit to TCD of these replacements that Sirus recommends, Stuart says:

“The units that we recommend, they all use non-ozone depleting gasses, they have a smaller footprint, they have smaller proponents and they are lighter in mass which means the manufacturing process is less impact. The transport of those machines has less impact. The installation is easier.

“We also connect those using IOT technology both to the BMS on site and remote access. We can also enable remote access to the manufacturer at the factory as well to enable firstly, a quicker response and fix and secondly, we haven’t got the impact of having to bring engineers to site or to that location specifically until we know there’s a problem that requires their attention.”

The biggest barrier to actually putting into practice these energy efficiency policies is the gathering of existing data on a company's efficiency, according to Stuart.

“Certainly, when we’re working and talking to other potential or existing customers the hardest thing for us is getting the baseline data and actually gathering that data to enable the correct target of spend for the maximum impact in cost efficiency and carbon reduction,” he said.

Do you want to know more about the implementation of sustainability in facilities management?

Register for our free webinar series on sustainability in FM now.

Our first webinar takes place on Tuesday, October 19^th on the Implementation of Sustainability in Facilities Management. Register here.

The second webinar in the series focuses on Emerging Technologies in Sustainability in FM. Register here.

The third and final webinar in this series will look at Leading the Change in Sustainability in FM. Register here.

All of our webinar attendees have opportunities to network, receive free eBooks and articles, join the Portobello FM online community for information sharing and receive an e-certificate of attendance from Portobello Institute.

If you are interested in progressing your career in FM, check out our courses here. If you have a question about FM at Portobello Institute, contact our Admissions Advisor, Jacky de Vries on jackie.devries@portobelloinstitute.com or call 01 892 0035.