“In the coming years we believe the scope of sustainable development would extend to setting up a robust interface with the city allowing for us to be better equipped to handle problems of traffic, congestion, pollution, water, electricity, solid waste and sanitation etc.”
Robust planning is one of the key factors that contribute towards making a building green. We believe in green or sustainable thinking as a core development proposition. We have dedicated environmental planners and sustainability experts in-house consulting jointly with industry experts on every project. Our comprehensive approach to sustainable development starts early on in the design phase through to construction, delivery and finally use of our buildings. Early climatic studies and utilizing tools such as energy modeling allow us to evaluate site selection, plan sustainable communities, and, reduce energy and water consumption in buildings. This in turn helps with optimizing their operational resource footprint and potentially translates into energy bill savings for our customers. We encourage the use of locally sourced construction material, which reduces the carbon footprint from transport and supports the growth of local industries. We reuse and recycle the bulk of our construction waste in order to divert it from landfills.
Well before ‘green homes’ became an industry buzzword, as founding members of the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC), our teams were researching, designing and delivering state of the art projects predicated on global benchmarks of sustainability. The IGBC has developed a rating system for the development lifecycle of buildings, homes and neighborhoods, intended to help designers, developers, owners, operators and facility managers to be environmentally responsible. At Godrej Properties all our recent buildings are pre-certified under this rating system. We participate actively in raising the bar using codes defined by IGBC setting up systems, mechanisms and platforms for these practices, codes and innovations to be realistically implemented.
In the coming years we believe the scope of sustainable development would extend to setting up a robust interface with the city allowing for us to be better equipped to handle problems of traffic, congestion, pollution, water, electricity, solid waste and sanitation etc.
Our goal in creating ‘green homes’ is not only to be responsible to our environment but also help our customers optimize their use of resources and live greener lives. The true benefits of a green home are realized by the homeowner through reduced energy and water usage and a higher quality of life through better indoor air quality. We are in the process to pilot post occupancy surveys to close the loop between green infrastructure and demonstrable benefits seen over the project lifecycle.
While a green home typically does not cost a lot more to maintain, green features do add to capital costs. We are now institutionalizing our processes to ensure that we meet our sustainability goals while maintaining profitability. We constantly engage our joint venture, design, construction and other partners to deliver buildings that meet green standards as defined by IGBC. We have further mandated this through tender inclusions and by formulating comprehensive program briefs to the consultants wherein sustainable design is built into the design process.
Sustainable development is our responsibility as it is communicating the rigour of our development journey to the customer. On one of our residential projects we have recently piloted a ‘sustainability manual’ that we included with the flat handover. This manual was formulated to leverage the green infrastructure to finally help our customers reduce their bills and yet live better lives.
