Roy Cokayne
The Cape Quarter, the flagship property in the Tower Property Fund’s portfolio, will soon undergo extensive greening transformation.
The transformation forms part of Tower Property’s greening and occupancy cost-cutting strategy for all of its buildings.
Cape Quarter’s managing agent, Spire Property Management, is carrying out the transformation. Squire Property national facilities manager Simon Penso said all fluorescent lighting in the parking area would be refitted with LED lighting and the cove lighting in the common areas replaced with LED strip lighting.
Penso said this would allow for a visual upgrade as well as a reduction in energy use, which was calculated at annual savings of 805 360 kilowatt-hours (kWh).
He said tenants would be offered package deals should they also want to do a lighting retrofit.
A basement fan sensor system initiative was prompted by the fact that extraction fans in the basement parking at the Cape Quarter ran constantly.
Penso said sensors would monitor the carbon monoxide levels in the basement and switch on the extraction fans only when needed. This was expected to cut the running time of the fans by 70 percent and save about 527 352kWh a year.
Penso said the Cape Quarter already had waterless urinals and a recycling programme, which recycled about 40 percent of all waste generated on site.
But he said Spire was always looking for ways to improve and was currently investigating the viability of a bio-digester to process all wet waste from the restaurants as well as a small bio-diesel plant that would turn all vegetable oil from the restaurants into bio-diesel.
Penso said the Cape Quarter had been accepted as a pilot building for the Green Building Council’s new rating tool for existing buildings, which would give the centre a Green Star rating.
Marc Edwards, Tower’s chief executive, said it would use the Green Building Council’s benchmarking tool to measure energy and water consumption compared with industry norms.
Edwards said Tower would roll out these measures at Cape Quarter first but similar initiatives at all of the buildings within the portfolio would follow soon.