The ITC Green Center that Hillary Clinton
visited last month is an early adopter of
sustainable construction.
If it were not for its bright red brick-work
facade, passersby would find it difficult to
spot the ITC Green Center among the soaring
glass and concrete blocks that are burgeoning
around it. Yet it was this building that Hillary
Clinton chose to visit during her crowded India
tour as US Secretary of State on July 19 as a
symbol of the judicious use of green technology
— an issue that is animating the global debate
on climate change.
Now four years old, the ITC’s red Green
Building, almost a veteran in Gurgaon, the
noveau riche satellite city to Delhi, has been
also a low-key trend-setter in green technology.
When it was completed in 2005, it was the
largest building of its kind with a Platinum
rating from the US Green Building Council (GBC)
covering 1,70,000 square feet. GBC is an NGO
dedicated to sustainable building design and
construction, and follows what is known as the
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment
Design) rating system, platinum being the
highest of the three ratings that include gold
and silver.
Today, the building has been overtaken in size
bya “green building” in Kolkata and another that
IT major Wipro has built in Gurgaon (both are
about 5,000 square feet bigger than the ITC
Green Center). Yet much of what ITC implemented
then is increasingly becoming an integral part
of new construction among more enlightened
corporations today.
When it started out, the building, which houses
the offices ITC’s hotels division, was planned
as a plain vanilla construction. Some urging
from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)
in 2003, however, persuaded ITC to experiment
with green technology. “We stopped work to
introspect a bit. An analysis of what we had
already done would get us a Gold rating, but the
chairman said, let’s go for a platinum rating,”
said Niranjan Khatri, general manager,
WelcomEnviron Initiatives, proferring a visiting
card that offers a simple eco-friendly way of
saving trees: It is half the width of a
conventional card.
The GBC rating systems requires five points of
action: (1) energy saving; (2) water management;
(3) use of green material; (4) educating others
and (5) innovation.
On energy, Khatri said the building has achieved
a 51 per cent saving by “design intent”. The
“design intent” means that the lobby and outer
rooms that attract so much natural light that
they preclude the need for artificial lighting
and the inner core requires much less lighting
than a conventional design would have permitted.
Khatri’s office, for instance, relies on natural
light.
To reduce the load on air-conditioning, the
rooftop was painted with something called a
“high albedo paint” that deflects heat back into
the atmosphere. Given that the roofs and side
walls of a building account for 47 per cent of
heat gain in a building, the heat-deflecting
paint means that the central air-conditioning
can run at a higher temperature than it does in
most offices.
Equipment purchases were also directed towards
energy-efficiency. For instance, the lighting
comprises CFL lamps and T5 tube lights, which
are thinner and more efficient than conventional
products, and the air-conditioning system
selected for installation has what Khatri called
a “high coefficient of performance”. The latter
was a more expensive option but a cost-benefit
analysis
suggested that the costs would be recovered in
five years. This was because the system used
about 130,000 units of energy a year against
630,000 units of energy a year for a comparable
conventional system. Solar heating powers the
hot water in the kitchens and toilets.
Simple personnel policies have also contributed
towards energy saving. Office timings, for
instance, have been set at 8.15 a m to 5.15 p m
— the maximum daylight hours that preclude the
need to use artificial lights. Since 70 per cent
of the Green Building staff comes from Delhi,
these work hours don’t pose a huge problem.
“Only the workaholics stay on,” Khatri joked.
Water saving followed a similar strategy of
eco-friendly design and purchases, the focus
being on zero discharge. “Not a drop goes into
the ‘water bank balance’,” said Khatri proudly.
All water is recycled through a sewage treatment
plant in the basement. For the lawns outside,
the plants have been chosen for not being water
intensive.
Importantly, eco-friendliness remains a
work-in-progress. For instance, the water was
recently disconnected in the urinals in the
men’s toilets, and replaced by a “bio block,” a
device that basically looks like Odonil and is
made out of microbes that absorbs liquid and
odours. This tiny device is now being rolled out
in all the staff locker room and will result in
a saving of 300 litre of water a year. “Also,
you don’t need to use A-category water for a
C-category function,” Khatri pointed out. Once
the bio-block is installed in the entire
Welcomgroup chain, the annual water saving could
rise to 15 million litres of water a year — a
point worth considering in a drought year.
All wood used in the building has been certified
by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a
Bonn-based NGO that sets global standards to
encourage sustainable forestry.
GBC’s education parameter has been met in
several ways that form part of what ITC group
likes to call its “conspicuous conservation”
agenda. First, the company has installed a touch
screen in the lobby that tells visitors waiting
at reception all about the building. Its website
www.itcwelcomgroup.in/welcomenviron
also documents its green initiatives in detail.
When it was complete, the Green Center faced a
15 per cent cost overrun that Khatri said could
be considered the “pioneer’s cost” because much
of the equipment had to be imported since the
market wasn’t really ready for such a concept at
the time. Constructing a green building today,
he reckons, would probably entail a cost premium
of 4 per cent.
