Sustainable Whole Life Costing Assessments
"Value for money is the optimum combination of whole-life cost and quality to meet the user's requirements" – Office of Government Commerce, 2007
In a changing economic landscape, how do you successfully navigate a cost-effective investment strategy?
Whole Life Costing (WLC) is a systematic approach to determining the overall costs throughout the life of any item, system, equipment or component. In the context of sustainable buildings, it is often applied to investment decisions designed to reduce a cost e.g. energy consumption as a consequence of an investment in a new piece of plant or building element e.g. solar panel or new window. It is, however, a flexible concept that can be applied to any context.
Our bespoke WLC tool is a unique decision making tool analysing financial costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions and can be used to:
- Compare investment options and develop Spend to Save strategies
- Independently verify financial and environmental projections for given products
- Benchmark products and services against alternatives
Unrivalled in its flexibility, our WLC tool can be applied to projects of any type and duration, be it one day or one hundred years.
Recent clients have benefited from:
- Evaluating alternative procurement options for an organisation's new headquarters;
- Assessing options to improve environmental performance during the refurbishment of existing healthcare facilities;
- Accrediting building materials on the basis of their environmental impacts throughout production, installation, operation and end of life;
- Ensuring optimal selection of renewable energy technologies across a broad spectrum of applications; and
- Comparing imported timber frames with traditional UK construction in the context of new self-build residential properties.
Our WLC tool is compliant with the International Standard for lifecycle costing (ISO15686), and can help achieve 3 BREEAM credits under BREEAM 2011.