Happy New Year! I wish you and your family a healthy and prosperous 2013.
After the closing of the nomination period for QPFMA 2012, I am pleased to note that a total of 174 nominations were submitted, which far exceeded the numbers of QPFMA 2010. This is exciting news for kicking off the new year. It reflects the wide recognition of the awards and demonstrates the eagerness of the practitioners to pursue excellence, professionalism, and service quality. It also echoes with our main theme this year, “Championing innovative service through quality management 服務顯創意管尚優質”. The vision of QPFMA is to stimulate greater public recognition of the industry and reward those who demonstrate contemplative performance in terms of bringing comfort, safety, and security to their users and occupiers, whilst complying with the legal requirements and maintaining a respect for the environment.
This year, we will put additional emphasis on the performance of green management operations and how they can be implemented innovatively. To cope with calls to expand the award categories, we have extended the coverage as follows:
Residential Category: Large scale/medium scale/small scale, Tenant Purchase Scheme & Public Rental Housing, Home Ownership Scheme & Private Sector Participation Scheme
Non-Residential Category: Shopping Centre Management, Office Building Management, Industrial Building Management, and Institutional Facility Management.
The Finalists’ presentation to the Judging Panel cum QPFMA 2012 Conference will be held on 9 March 2013, while the Award Presentation & Dinner Reception will be held on 26 April 2013. I will keep members posted of any update in the coming months.
I joined the 10th Anniversary of the Professional Green Building Council (PGBC) on 28 December 2012 at the Zero Carbon Building, which was an excellent choice of venue to celebrate and embrace the PGBG’s achievements over the past decade. I am so grateful to be associated with the PGBG for the past four years and to work with groups of professionals from the different disciplines, all of whom shared the same passion for promoting green buildings in Hong Kong. Mrs. Carrie Lam, Chief Secretary for Administration and the Guest of Honour, endorsed the contributions of the PGBC to the green building movement. The Council’s staunch support has been most invaluable. The PGBC, which was established in 2002, is a professional alliance of architects, engineers, landscape architects, surveyors, and town planners. One of its biggest achievements was its introduction of a green building award in 2006, which is the first of its kind in the region and now has been increasingly recognized at the local and regional levels.
Recently, I joined a retreat organized by the BEAM Society, Ltd. (BSL) with the other directors. During a discussion of Technical Review, I expressed my great concern over fulfilling the requirements of a BEAM Plus Existing Building (EB), which is extremely difficult, if not impossible. To my understanding, there have been only a few applications submitted so far for EB, so the BSL has to address this problem. In my opinion, the whole EB manual does not cater to the various designs, facilities, and space constraints encountered by the EB projects. For example, even if a client wants to replace its aged air-cooled chillers with water-cooled chillers, which could achieve substantial savings in energy consumption, it may not be able to proceed due to the structural and space constraints of the building. However, the emerging market should be in the EB category by virtue of the existing buildings in Hong Kong accounting for almost 90% of all electricity consumption and 60% of all greenhouse gas emissions. For EB, we should put more emphasis on green management operations and continue to make energy consumption more efficient rather than put its focus on building designs and infrastructure aspects. I sincerely hope that if the EB manual caters to the aforementioned aspects, I anticipated more EB applications being filed and, ultimately, a long term improvement in the overall carbon mission figures.
