Antithesis shrinks Birmingham New Street's carbon footprint
Launched in 2013, Antithesis Group set out to become the world’s leading sustainability consulting business. In less than two years the company is well on the way to achieving that goal with a client list that includes some of the world’s leading sustainability organisations.
Whether it’s helping Tesco develop a “farm to fork” methodology that identifies waste hotspots throughout its supply chain, or providing sustainability support for events from London 2012 to Jamie Oliver’s Roadshow, the approach is the same – to go from imagining big ideas to implementing them.
Few organisations can match the consultancy’s depth and breadth of sustainability experience and the Antithesis team contains some pioneering minds.
A groundbreaking initiative to reduce Birmingham New Street station’s carbon footprint illustrates the group’s reach. The £600m project involves Antithesis managing collaboration with Network Rail, Birmingham city council, Cofely and John Lewis.
The rebuilt New Street station is three times the size of the old station and has commensurate electricity needs. Installing a combined heat and power plant, connected to Birmingham district energy scheme, will enable excess heat to be pumped to dozens of offices and buildings around the station. As well as reducing its energy bills this will potentially cut carbon emissions by up to 3,000 tonnes a year with the wider scheme.
Challenges in a project of this size and ambition are inevitable, especially in the move from design and procurement to construction and commissioning.
Antithesis has the experience to know it’s critical to stay focused on the considerable success the project can deliver while engineers make the tweaks and balances typically needed to get the system operating well.