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It was part of an ancient weather system that brought mass flooding throughout the Queensland area. And luckily, there were no big surprises in the process, apart from a 27 million-year-old riverbed found beneath the site’s footprint. This added to the massive challenge and took what Gill calls a “perfect synergy between all those groups” to be successful. It involved input from facilities management, ICT department, the university’s executive board, campus staff and students, to minimise disruptions to all while balancing a tight schedule and budget. As the campus uses a centralised system, the air-cooled chiller and the water towers work in unison, requiring extensive pipework in the basement.Īs if this wasn’t enough to juggle, the team had to grapple with a number of further challenges including a handover between two different building contractors, minimising noise and careful scheduling to eliminate disturbance during exam periods (which continued despite demolitions and construction work), 2017’s Cyclone Debbie and a couple of coordinated campuswide electrical shutdowns, which necessitated generators for dehumidifiers in the library and freezers in the morgue. Pipework being installed for the chiller plant. “Every service got touched on that campus. “We had to move every service known to mankind,” recalls Gill, who proceeds to list them: fire hydrant, main incoming water, air-conditioning, high voltage and low voltage electrical distribution, Telstra, sewer and loading dock. To call it ambitious would be an understatement.Īmong other things, it involved choosing a different location to the one originally planned, so as to better reflect the climate of the region (including shading an adjacent building to reduce cooling costs). The Mercy Building would not stand alone as one sustainable asset it would instead become a centralised plant for the entire campus’ sustainability efforts. “It was about being very clear-eyed about this, and thinking ‘well, what gives the best bang for buck for the organisation and for a sustainability program?’,” Doggett recalls.Ĭhris Gill, ACU’s state development manager for Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, and project manager for the Mercy Building’s planning and construction, walks us through the many and challenging steps it took to ensure the project was a success. “The cheapest energy is always the energy that you don’t buy,” he says, “likewise for water consumption and waste generation. The team has sharpened this “clear-eyed understanding of what delivers the best value for an organisation from the point of view of sustainability” over the years. “We have to find a way to deliver sustainability for the university in a way that matches our internal resourcing… it’s come down to daily disciplines, very much around making sure we attack waste whenever we’re able to identify it and see it,” Doggett says. Doggett explains how, without funding for solar panels or major contracts to purchase renewable energy, and without teams of engineers that one may see driving sustainability initiatives at somewhere like Monash University or Melbourne University, ACU is consistently shown to be one of Australia’s most energy-efficient, water efficient and low greenhouse impact universities in the country.
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With steadfast determination to cut costs and unnecessary use in the fundamentals of water, energy, waste, materials and greenhouse gases, the school is all about measuring environmental impacts. ACU’s national sustainability manager Mark Doggett describes the Mercy Building project, and indeed the organisation’s entire approach to sustainability, as having a “very strong FM-based focus”.