BREEAM Int'l New Construction 2016 Case Study: Akropole Shopping Center & Akropole Business center

Project – Akropole Shopping Center and Akropole Business center

Maskavas 257, Riga, Latvia

• Investor: SIA “M257”
• Type: New Construction – Commercial
• Certification: BREEAM International New Construction 2016
• One Click LCA Expert: Kiril Simbirskij – Vesta Consulting
• One Click LCA used for: LCA- Mat 01 Life Cycle Impacts

Akropole building in Riga, Latvia is the biggest shopping mall with a business centre in Latvia with 87394 m2 of gross area. The building has achieved two BREEAM International New construction certificates with the level Very Good – one for Akropole Shopping center and second one for Akropole Business Center. 

Vesta sustainability experts have used One Click LCA software and succeeded in overcoming such challenges for life cycle assessment under BREEAM MAT01 category, as the building’s large scale and complexity.

• One of the most grateful sustainability implementation forms was reusing of the former historical features of the Akropole site area – some of the old constructions and previously used materials were recovered and reused during the construction. VESTA has also conducted several additional third-party studies, including digital building modeling and a variety of simulations in order to develop sustainable building and attractive area for the community.
• The building was designed following BIM procedures and the majority of valuable data was obtained from BIM models, which made the overall process more precise and less time-consuming. The ability of One Click LCA tool to read BIM files and process the data take-off and mapping has been a key factor that has enormously reduced the amount of work that would have otherwise been necessary. 
• Vesta team specialists have identified and fixed all major inconsistencies of components modeled in BIM environment by comparing those to As-Built documentation using benchmarking and support tools within the software.
• The One Click LCA tool does additionally have a very convenient instant access to an impressive database of materials and EPDs as well as easy-to-use automatic calculations of total life cycle impact.

Best practices shared by Vesta team:

• We are initiating supplementary workshops for BIM managers working on the projects to implement sustainable features and especially those to achieve sustainability certification. There is still a lot to achieve in BIM implementation in the Baltic region in order to reach the best practice, therefore we provide advisory support for BIM managers including detailing the data we will be taking off and making sure that designers use less generic materials for the design project.
• The amount of businesses concerned about the embodied carbon is constantly growing, thus making the importance of timely LCA of the proposed design crucial to achieve the long-term sustainability goals. 
• We believe that informed decision-making is the key to sustainable development, and LCA is one of the industry-accepted methods to weight your design against the impacts.