This year we're keen to showcase the awesome mahi our community are doing and the leaders backing sustainable building in Aotearoa. So, this month we're starting our Meet the Member series; a chance to hear more about the new faces joining the NZGBC, and learn about their ambitions for the future. We asked TM Consultant's Managing Director Mike Baker what they're up to.
Tell us a bit about TM Consultants
TM Consultants are multi-award-winning consulting engineers. We have a collaborative one stop shop team of 75 serving all of NZ from our Auckland, Christchurch, and Queenstown offices. We provide the full suite of engineering disciplines (structural, civil, building services, fire, energy, sustainability) with one of NZ’s largest teams of dedicated BIM modellers in house. We provide engineering across all type of buildings and developments – if you can live in it, work in it, drive on it, fly out of it, check into it, be incarcerated at it, holiday at it, ski down it, shop in it and retire to it, then we’ve done it. We have a strong focus on fully detailed design with our agile team of enthusiastic engineers, strongly integrating sustainable design throughout our work.
You’ve just joined the NZGBC – what’s brought you to us?
TM Consultants have been part of the green building community for a long time, providing Green Star services design, GSAPNZ services, and NABERSNZ ratings since around 2010. We have many firsts and the highest rated buildings in our long list of projects. NZGBC membership is just a sign of our commitment to that community, and a way to say hey we’re here and willing to be part of the push for greening our building and construction industry''.
What ambitions do you have for membership and future projects?
We want to continue our strong industry leadership in promoting and encouraging sustainable design practices. We are Climate Leadership Coalition signatories and in 2020 we ran free industry training courses throughout NZ on how to build smarter. Architects, designers, project managers, QSs, facilities managers are all helped by the training we provide. We want all projects to be net carbon zero and whilst we realise this isn’t always possible, our mandate is to show people that both building owners and occupiers can benefit simultaneously by thinking green.
What do you think is key to successfully greening Aotearoa’s buildings?
We anticipate that the upcoming revision of building code’s H1 clause will be a large step in the right direction. A move towards more ‘passive’ style buildings will dramatically reduce operational energy use. However, the full story of greening Aotearoa’s buildings needs to include reductions to the embodied carbon in building materials. One thing we learnt from Thinkstep’s recent ‘Under Construction’ report is that approximately 10% of New Zealand’s net emissions are tied up in building materials. As a result, we expect a lot of projects to initially substitute steel structure with timber laminates, and cement with cement substitutes such as volcanic ash.
Like the 5.5-star NABERSNZ whole building rating for IAG we recently completed, coming on the back of the major services upgrade we designed and commissioned, we were able to show that the value of the asset upon sale went up more than the investment in “greening” this building. The anchor tenant’s 700+ staff (IAG) gained significantly improved IEQ conditions and saved on average a whopping 48% in energy usage. Stories like this show that sustainability can readily result in a win-win for both parties and we as an industry should be promoting the results of similar projects. The myth that capex is a barrier to green buildings is readily disprovable and we want to continue to be agents of change with this.
Find out more about TM Consultants here