Ombu, Chile15th April 2021

About the Project

The Ombú building is an office building, has 10 floors above ground and 5 underground. It was constructed in 2011 and is located in the commune of Providencia. The building owes its name to an old tree located at the back of the building, called Ombú, to date, this tree continues to be part of the building’s environment.

The building seeks to generate value for its users by focusing on sustainability and energy savings. During 2020, the building began to measure the carbon footprint of its operation. There are also plans this year, and beyond, for the building to implement recycling systems, reduce energy consumption and increase the percentage of green areas through the installation of hanging plants and low water consumption in addition to reusing rainwater. The building has low consumption elevators, fully LED interior lighting, an air conditioning system with type r-410 refrigerant, parking for bicycles, among other qualities.

Environmental Challenges and Green Strategy

The greatest environmental challenges for the building are to maintain and increase its standard and commitment to sustainability, promoting energy saving, carbon neutrality and circular economy, allowing the creation of more pleasant spaces, increasing the quality of the user / visitor experience and adding value to the asset.

The high standards that BREEAM manages for the certification of assets, allows to improve the level of the facilities, constantly encouraging and challenging to improve the score, to obtain an increasingly sustainable space.

Among the major initiatives carried out is the use of paint made with resins obtained from recycled EPS (expanded polystyrene) to completely paint the stairwell, subways and the parking demarcations. Another important challenge and commitment was to start the measurement of the carbon footprint, allowing us to start a starting point that provides future guidelines to improve indicators.

What are the benefits of assessing to BREEAM?

Thanks to the BREEAM certification, the building has managed to make a reduction in its electricity costs by approximately 20%, due to the change of all lighting to LED. Due to the profile of the companies and users of the building, it is attractive to stay in a sustainable, responsible space and also with an important certification. This same condition adds value when offering the space to the arrival of potential new tenants.

The BREEAM certification helps to generate ambitious and important challenges in sustainability, environmental responsibility and in the integration of the building community, generating loyalty and commitment in the tenant-management-owner relationship allowing the client to have the peace of mind of being in a building that obtains savings in its energy consumption, safer spaces, responsible with the environment and that knows and recognizes the impact of its operations on the environment.