Improving the sustainability of existing commercial buildings

Existing buildings make up 98% of office floor space and are responsible for a large share of the commercial sector's environmental impacts.

The first step to managing and improving the environmental performance of existing commercial office buildings is to measure, track and benchmark performance.

Rating your building

Measure the environmental impact of your building, based on key data such as energy and water bills, through National Australian Built Environment Rating Scheme (NABERS). NABERS is designed to provide you with a simple indication of how well you are managing these environmental impacts compared with your peers and neighbours.

To obtain a NABERS Rating, you must engage an accredited third party assessor, from the list of assessors on the NABERS website.

Improving performance

Once you understand your current building performance, you can investigate opportunities for improving performance through:

• better building management and energy/water metering
• improving building control systems and tuning
• recommissioning the building so it operates as originally intended
• retrofitting equipment
• major plant upgrade
• floor or building refurbishment
• tenancy environmental management, fitouts and retrofits.