Going green

With an energy-hungry leisure industry consuming more than £700M worth of energy every year and rising fast, it is no surprise that leisure managers can reap huge rewards by focusing on reducing their carbon footprint.

By making just a 10% reduction in energy consumption, we could save over £70M every year between us and reduce carbon emissions by hundreds of thousands of tonnes. It is no longer simply about complying with the latest environmental legislation such as Display Energy Certificates and the Carbon Reduction Commitment, going green can bring major
bottom-line benefits.

At Leisure Connection, together with our partners we have been addressing our environmental impact for some time and have implemented an environmental plan throughout our centres the length and breadth of the country.

Local Authorities have an ever-increasing obligation to reduce their carbon footprint and the leisure industry can play a major role in helping them to achieve that goal. There are some 1,500 sports and leisure facilities in the UK: all major users of energy through heating, lighting, ventilation and air conditioning.

Committed to reducing our carbon footprint, we have been working with the Carbon Trust to devise and implement a number of energy saving programmes and for more than two years now we have been trialling a number of initiatives designed to decrease the energy and water consumption throughout our estate of more than 60 centres.

Using a number of our sites as test beds, we trialled different technologies with some remarkable results. One of our sites realised a saving of more than 16% (£32k on an annual bill of nearly £200k) on all utilities by investing in new technologies, which took control of the environment and removed manual operation.

A vital part of that success was our awareness-raising campaign across the centres to focus people on the value and benefits of energy saving. We educate all our teams to use their own initiative when it comes to managing energy more efficiently – by simply turning things off when not required, or to turn it on its head, to switch things on only when required and off when finished!

The fundamental technical strategy was to add, automate and optimise environmental controls so that energy demand was tightly matched to use and occupancy. We reduced the speeds of main electric motors, removed competing heating and cooling systems, insulated, optimised the Building Management System to reflect actual occupancy and used re-lamping as an opportunity to install energy efficient lighting and daylight/occupancy controls.

Other devices such as water-saving shower heads were installed, which resulted in substantial savings in water and the gas to heat it, without compromising the quality of our showers.

Key to all these measures has been our ability to accurately measure and target energy use, by the installation of automatic meter readers (AMRs). Our motto is - if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!

Lessons learned from our trials and key successes are now being implemented throughout all our centres and Leisure Connection has installed a network of Energy Champions to ensure they are operated as efficiently as possible, through awareness and good housekeeping.

Good energy housekeeping is fundamental to maintaining the momentum of those results and to communicating the benefits: healthier and more productive working conditions, a more comfortable environment for customers and vital cost savings, which helps protect jobs in a difficult economic climate.

We were delighted when the Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers (CIBSE) recognised our energy efficiency efforts by presenting us with their Client of the Year Award at their Low Energy Awards this year.

We were more recently nominated for a Municipal Journal (MJ) award for working in partnership with our clients. For one centre in particular, we jointly introduced state of the art technologies that reduced its carbon footprint.

Helping to combat climate change is also important to our users who are increasingly choosing centres seen to be taking positive steps to protect the environment.

Through our early investment, experimentation and the knowledge gained, we are in a strong position to assist and advise our partners in their endeavours to reduce carbon and in partnership with them, are now looking to roll these projects out across the estate and to discuss with them how we can mutually benefit from the development of a technical carbon management strategy.

Paul Bailey, Head of Property, Leisure Connection