With the growing awareness of sustainable practices, tenants have increasing expectations of workplace environments and the rising cost of resources places extreme pressure on building owners, facility managers and property managers to operate buildings at top performance levels whilst keeping their operating costs down.

“The key to a building manager’s success lies in understanding and surmounting these challenges,” says Nicola Douglas, CEO of the Green Building Council of South Africa. 

“The Green Building Council of South Africa will be holding a series of workshops in April on how to understand your buildings performance and green your operations that will assist owners and managers in managing their buildings in a  more efficient and sustainable way.”

These workshops will be presented by experienced green building consultants from Green Building Services, Inc in Oregon, US – Elaine Aye and Ted Spear, who regularly run similar courses on behalf of the US Green building Council.

“The first step is to understand your buildings current performance and to thereby establish a baseline - this is done through energy and sustainability audits.  The next step is to focus on immediate low cost or no cost improvements and then to establish a plan and schedule for implementation - whether they are mechanical, plumbing or operational in nature,” explains Aye.

“Finally, it is important to know exactly which variables to measure and track to effectively monitor progress,” she concludes.

“Identifying the tools and strategies necessary to help building owners and managers to address the diverse needs of their existing buildings successfully will be a core element behind this course,” says Douglas, who explains that the presentation will offer participants practical insights from case studies and actual experience of working with a variety of projects that have benefited from adopting these practices.

The 1-day courses will be run in Cape Town at the V&A Waterfront on 19 April and in Johannesburg at The Forum on 21 and 23 April 2010.  All participants also receive a free copy of the Existing Building Survival Strategy, valued at R700 which was developed by the Green Building Council of South Africa together with international engineering and consulting group Arup.  It is a practical, user-friendly, step by step guide on the process of retrofitting existing buildings to become greener and more efficient.

For more information on this course please contact the Green Building Council of South Africa on (021) 659 5990 or visit www.gbcsa.org.za