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| Sustainability in store |
Little did we know when campaigning for the Fingal energy standard in 2005-06 that Construct Ireland would have a direct impact on Ikea’s first Irish store. Driven by a combination of Fingal’s requirements and their own renewable energy policy, the Swedish retail giant has invested in the largest ground source heat pump installation in Ireland and the UK, along with a well-thought biomass system fed by an onsite waste stream and a host of other green measures, as John Hearne reports
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The boiler is housed next to the loading bay/recycling centre to the rear of the building. Here, all waste wood, from pallets and damaged furniture are manually fed into a chipper. The woodchip produced is then conveyed via belts to a holding silo. From there, it’s augured into the boiler as required. All woodchip for the boiler is generated onsite, with no additional need for pellets or chips. In the recycling centre, all waste from the store is conveyed and separated into bins and compactors. Within the first four months of opening, the store has reached a recycling rate of 90 per cent. Charlie Browne of Ikea believes that the recycling equipment at the Dublin store will pay for itself within twelve months. “That’s assuming we did nothing and sent everything to landfill.”
“When we started recycling, we used to have a sealed compactor, which would crush the cardboard, then it would then be taken away and put it into another baling machine. We said hold on a minute, we’re doing the hard work by loading it into the bin and sorting it, why don’t we put the mill-size balers on our own sites and so instead of getting a cardboard bin which was a free uplift and someone else got the revenue, we baled it ourselves and loaded that straight into a curtain-side or a container. That goes to the mill and we get £25 a bale for it. In Dublin, that revenue will come to between e20,000 and e30,000 a year.”
All waste from the store is separated and recycled where possible
All lighting is low energy, with PIRs installed in office and toilet areas. The building energy management system optimises the energy mix throughout the store. Different zones within the building have very different heating and cooling requirements. The loading bay area is necessarily exposed to the elements for long periods, generating a large heating requirement, which is looked after by the biomass boiler via high level heating cartridges. In the market hall, extensive lighting displays and high occupancy generate a substantial cooling load, while in the warehouse, where customers push trolleys and load up their own flat-packs, there’s a lesser heating load due to the nature of the activity – temperatures are generally maintained between 17 and 19 degrees.
Rainwater is harvested from the roof area, chlorinated and used in all public toilets and to irrigate the landscape. It’s a symphonic rainwater system, Frank Doyle explains. “A symphonic system has far more capacity because it flows under a vacuum. When the rain fills to a particular level, the pipe runs full,” he says. Because air isn’t allowed in, the entire pipe volume is used, so you can reduce pipe diameters dramatically. “If you had a conventional system, you would need a huge amount of rainwater outlets for a building of this scale.” Once the water is collected, the pipes split off, with a third harvested for greywater recycling and two thirds going into the attenuation tank. “This system minimises lots of things, including pipe sizes, but also roof penetrations and maintenance.”
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Issue 2, Vol 5 Out Now
The new look issue of Construct Ireland is available now. Click here to subscribe online and have the latest issue delivered to your doorstep
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