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Positive energy buildings: Unilever Europe/South Africa case studies
Corporate Real Estate Journal,
7
(1),
23-28
(2017)
Abstract
Office buildings that generate more energy than they consume have been built in Europe, and with the positive-energy office building of Unilever Paris, the company has already demonstrated its commitment towards the goal of becoming ‘carbon neutral’ in its operations by 2030. Following on this success in Europe, an investigation and proposal was prepared for a similar positive-energy workplace to function as Unilever’s African hub. The authors presented the results of this investigation at the 2016 EMEA CoreNet conference held in Amsterdam.
Keywords: sustainability; carbon neutral; energy positive; feed-in to grid
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Mauritz Kruger leads the Green Building business line in Southern Africa at Royal HaskoningDHV, and is involved as architect/sustainability consultant on diverse projects: Best Practice Green Building, Certification of Existing Building’s Performance and Energy Audits for offices and airports. He also led his team of colleagues to develop the Green Building Council of South Africa Existing Building Performance rating tool as lead technical consultants. Since 2007 he has focused on designing environmentally sustainable buildings through implementation of passive measures, harnessing solar energy, environmental management, energy efficiency, water harvesting and peak demand management by BMS. He holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pretoria.
Johan Van Der Walt currently heads up Unilever’s real estate team in Africa and the Middle East. He started his career in real estate as an investment broker with C&W. He proceeded to advise on and manage the portfolios of multinational clients including Canon, Nike, Converse and Unilever across Africa, Europe and Asia. Johan has extensive multidisciplinary international experience having lived in Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Shanghai. He holds a BEng (Electrical) and BSc (Physics and Mathematics) from the North West University.
Robert Tuinenburg is Director EMEA, Employee Services — Workplace, Enterprise & Technology Solutions at Unilever. In this role he is responsible for real estate, projects, facility management services, travel, fleet, events and deployment of the Unilever Sustainability and Agile Working strategic agenda. Robert holds an academic degree in Business & Economics from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He started his career in finance and information technology, where he held different senior positions, before moving to his current role. Robert is particularly interested in building strategic partnerships, which will enable Unilever to drive the integrated workplace offering.
