The Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) officially launched the Green Star SA Public and Education Building version 1 rating tool at its yearly convention in Cape Town on Wednesday.

The tool would be used to assess and assign a Green Star SA rating based on the environmental merits of new or significantly refurbished public and education building developments.

It consists of eight environmental-impact categories for assessment and one innovation category with ratings possible at the design phase (design rating), as well as post-construction phase (as built).

Buildings to be assessed would fall under the classifications of entertainment and public assembly, theatrical and indoor sport, places of instruction, places of worship, exhibition buildings and museums. Thus, the tool would include community buildings, libraries, schools and tertiary education facilities, courts and public transport terminals, among others.

The pilot version of the tool was launched at the 2011 GBCSA convention. Over the past year, it had been assessed against a number of public and private sector projects to ensure its suitability for the South African environment, after being adapted from an Australian rating tool.

The Construction Industry Development Board, as an agency of the Department of Public Works, provided R1.3-million in funding for the pilot project. This was the single biggest sponsorship the GBCSA had received to date for a rating tool development and accounted for approximately 75% of the total project cost, said GBCSA technical manager Francois Retief.

The pilot phase of the project ran until the end of September 2012 and included five projects, these being the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) Business School in Port Elizabeth, the Cavalli Restaurant and Conference Centre in Stellenbosch, the University of South Africa (Unisa) library in Pretoria and the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC).

According to Retief, the NELM and NMMU projects were currently finalising their submissions and were likely to achieve certification under the pilot rating tool in the near future, while the CTICC and Unisa projects would be aiming for certification under the officially released version 1 of the rating tool.

Speaking to Engineering News Online before the opening of the convention, GBCSA chairperson Bruce Kerswill said that going forward the intention was to develop more Green Star SA rating tools for existing buildings, rather than new developments, in order to improve their environmental sustainability, as “95% of buildings are existing buildings”.

“So, the first step in that process has been piloting the energy and water benchmarking tool, as energy is a key component. You want to measure the ongoing operations of buildings, and the tools to measure that haven’t been universally successful so we are spending a bit of time making sure what we do really does work for our marketplace.”

The energy and water benchmarking tool for office buildings would be the first part of a larger rating tool to benchmark the environmental performance of existing buildings' operations and maintenance and had been developed by the GBCSA following a survey of 350 buildings across South Africa. The energy and water benchmarking pilot tool was currently freely available from the GBCSA for self-assessment and public comment, but not yet for certification.