La Roca Village, first BREEAM Excellent**** certified shopping center
Achieved the BREEAM Excellent Certificate during project phase of the remodeling of La Roca Village Shopping Center (31.644 m2), being the first shopping center to achieve this level of requirement in the BREEAM ES New Construction certification.
La Roca Village is the largest outlet-type shopping complex in southern Europe, and it is located in the municipality of La Roca del Vallès. Due to its success, it was decided to expand the Village and increase the underground parking space. The project, with a total constructed area of 31.644 m2, seeks to guarantee, as much as possible, its lowe environmental impact through the use of the BREEAM certification.
Ecopenta has been in charge of evaluating the viability of applying the BREEAM certification of this expansion project. We’ve worked together with the property, in order to optimize the project at its maximum, recommending improvements on it and, later, accompanying the property during the construction, to guarantee the fulfillment of the established sustainability objectives.
The strategy followed to achieve the highest level of certification in the most cost-effective way, was based on three basic criteria:
- Obtaining credits that suppose a minimal extra cost. Seeking to meet all those that do not suppose any extra cost or, in case there is one, it is reduced.
- Simple credits. It was proposed to obtain those credits that, due to BREEAM’s own requirements and/or building characteristics, were more affordable to obtain, because of this, priority was given to design aspects and technical studies and reports.
- Speed in obtaining the certificate. We sought to obtain all the necessary points once the building was built, avoiding possible credits in post-construction stages.
The first step of this process consisted in the elaboration of the certification strategy to follow, taking into account, the environmental objectives of our client, the viability in obtaining the different credits was defined, separating them between the assured credits and the possible ones. The possible credits, were divided in 3 categories: easy, difficult and very difficult. In this way, the feasability of applying them could be studied.
Once this report was prepared, the level of certification to be achieved was agreed with the property, so that concrete strategies were developed to achieve the number of credits needed to certify the expansion with a BREEAM Excellent **** level.
The credits that have been given priority, are those related to management, water and energy savings, transport easiness, proper waste management, materials to be used and pollution generated in the environment.
One of the advanced strategies of this project has been the elaboration, by Ecopenta, of the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of the Project, as part of the justification of the requirements of the MAT 1 credit: Impacts of the life cycle, for the process of BREEAM ES New Construction certification.