Environmental & Sustainability

The Northrop Sustainability Group is the newest contribution to Northrop's wide range of services, bringing sustainability advice from all engineering disciplines under the one banner.

Our advantage over other sustainability consultants, is that as we are able to draw on over thirty years of building services, civil and structural engineering experience in providing our sustainability services.

We provide sustainability services to our clients across the following areas:

• ESD Master Planning;
• ESD Development Briefs;
• Government Grant Submissions;
• Sustainability Design Advice;
• Engineering Design Solutions;
• Building Performance Simulations;
• Independent Commissioning;
• ESD Construction Management;
• Building Tuning and Recommissioning;
• Sustainability Guidelines and Building Users Guides;
• Building Performance Assessments;
• Section J BCA Assessments;
• Green Star Submissions; and,
• NABERS Assessments.

Green Star and NABERS are currently the most prominent voluntary sustainability rating tools in the Australian market. Green Star is a design based framework targeting building management, energy, water, materials, indoor environment quality, emissions, transport and land use and ecology. NABERS is an operational third-part verified framework targeting predominantly energy but most recently water, waste and indoor environment quality.

In Australia, it is estimated that buildings consume 40% of our energy supply and 15% of our water supply, and produce 23% of our greenhouse gas emissions and 40% of our waste. Over the past few years, there has been a significant change in the way we design our buildings. However, we are now in an era where sustainability benchmarks are rapidly changing. At Northrop, we ensure our professionals at the forefront of this market transformation. We educate our clients to understand that sustainability must be measured over the entire life cycle: from raw material extraction, transportation, construction, operation and disposal or recycling; to ensure their buildings do not become obsolete upon construction.

Our vision is to create positive developments for every client. Positive developments which create more renewable energy than they consume; use low embodied energy materials by reusing structures and using reused building materials; recycle all demolition waste and have building elements which can be disassembled for future uses. Any new materials will be considered based on their performance over the buildings whole life cycle. Positive developments replace hardstand areas with vegetated areas, to assist in cleansing the air of carbon dioxide and to passively reduce internal temperatures. They also create food from waste by treating and reusing all wastewater generated onsite, and potentially, as in the case with sewer mining, they source wastewater external to the site for treatment and reuse.

Our door is always open to any client wishing to discuss sustainability options for their next project.