[Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy OVG Real Estate/Unilever]
If you sit down to work at Unilever’s U.S. headquarters and you’re too cold or hot–or you’re working on a laptop and the lights above you are too bright–you can pull out an app on your phone and tweak the room’s settings. Throughout the building, 15,000 sensors also measure temperature, light, carbon dioxide, humidity, and who’s present in a room, helping the building adjust over time to become more efficient. On a Friday afternoon in the summer, when many of the building’s 1,600 employees are working remotely and the building sensors report low occupancy, the company can choose to shut down whole floors or buildings.
The technology is one part of a new total renovation of the consumer product giant’s New Jersey office park, which was originally constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, designed to help the company reach its goal to be carbon positive in operations by 2030–and help attract a younger workforce. In the renovation, four buildings were connected into one 325,000 square foot space. Along with several other changes, including swapping out old windows and lights and installing solar panels on the roof, the company now expects to cut the office’s carbon footprint in half. OVG, a Dutch developer behind the retrofit, guaranteed that goal through what they call a “green lease” or an eco agreement.
When OVG first proposed some of the changes to the building, the company hesitated. “The CFO said to me, ‘That’s all nice, I’ve heard this story before, but nobody will give me the guarantee–they’ll come up with all kinds of projections and models, but nobody wants to give me the guarantee that those energy costs really will go down. Then I said, ‘It’s very simple, I will give you that guarantee,” says Coen van Oostrom, CEO of OVG. The company collaborated with the architecture firm Perkins and Will and real estate companies Cushman and Wakefield and Normandy on the project.
In a contract that will last 10 years, OVG promises that the headquarters’ energy consumption will drop at least 40%, which corresponds to a 50% cut in carbon emissions. Water use will drop 50%. As long as Unilever uses the building in a way outlined in the contract, if energy or water use is higher than expected, OVG will cover the cost.
[Photo: Garrett Rowland/courtesy OVG Real Estate/Unilever]