It’s not what you expect to see at the V&A Waterfront: a wall made with wine bottles, the contents long-since consumed; roof and columns made from demolished building scraps; windows and floorboards pilfered from some other place.
Even the garden outside is recyclable, fresh veggies growing in succulent rows, ready to be turned into breakfast smoothies — at the V&A’s zero-carbon Portswood Café on Wednesday, the precinct’s first commercial building made almost entirely from recycled material.
Only the compliance items are new - water and fire equipment, statutory signage, and some of the window glass.
Unveiled to mark World Environment Day, the cafe is expected to be the first of many green buildings, with the ultimate aim being a zero-carbon stamp of approval. The cafe is well on its way to qualify, with a net carbon zero structure. It will accommodate a sustainable food company and serve as the architectural poster child of the V&A’s sustainability drive.
It’s a success story not only for the V&A but for project manager Okhela Gampu, who says she was the most relieved of all to see it finally take shape: “I wanted to give up so many times. My principal at the time would just wag a finger and say, no ways, you’re going to deliver.
“It was a first for us as a business to do something like this,” Gampu told TimesLIVE Premium during a walking tour of the site. Unlike normal building processes where the design dictated the building process, in the case of the cafe, available building materials often dictated the design: “We were constantly tweaking the design. That is why it was frustrating — people didn’t understand why it was taking so long with this tiny little building.”
The V&A team are now gearing up for the next phase in the journey, official net carbon-zero status, by detailing their energy and waste footprint. Gampu said: “We now have to prove it.”
V&A communications chief Donald Kau said the company went to great lengths to ensure the building was as net-zero as possible: “We’ve built big buildings much quicker than this one was done,” Kau said at a briefing inside the new premises, at which journalists were served snacks provisioned partly from the adjoining veggie garden.
Kau said: “This is a low-tech, low-energy building and certainly the first of its kind in the Waterfront. We believe that this demonstration can highlight the role of alternative building methodologies for broader applications and sector development, demonstrating circular economy thinking in practise.”
The V&A has been driving sustainability since 2008. Milestones achieved include:
- a 40% reduction in energy use, partly due to 2MW photovoltaic solar panels which generate 1,640,000 kWh of clean energy annually;
- an annual recycling pipeline of 2,300 tonnes of organic waste and 2,100 tonnes of other waste, adding up to a 62% diversion of waste to landfills; and
- a total of 22 buildings given a green star grading by the Green Building Council of SA.
