- CCCR fulfills parameters of the EDGE Certification System
On the afternoon of Friday May 17th, the Centro de Convenciones de Costa Rica (CCCR) received the EDGE certification for facilities post production, which is awarded by Green Building Council Costa Rica (GBCCR) in virtue of its characteristics related to sustainability.
EDGE is an international certification system managed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an entity associated by the World Bank. Its purpose is to accelerate the change toward sustainable building in developing countries through a certification system that is simple, accessible, objective and based on free software.
“At the conventions center we feel very pleased to have obtained this certification, and we, as Grupo Heroica, are committed to sustainability and convinced that technological innovation destined to achieve constructions that are more environmentally friendly plays a fundamental role in the compound’s DNA. This venue was built from a sustainable design, with a bioclimatic architecture that aims to protect and achieve a better profit from the resources available. We have interior spaces with natural lighting and sunlight diffusers, reflective roofing, walls and sun shields that mitigate the sun heating and allow the climatization equipment to work more efficiently. Additionally, we have high-technology air conditioned with energy saving systems that work by specific areas, allowing to use it by sections of the building,” commented Álvaro Rojas, General Manager of the Centro de Convenciones de Costa Rica.
“On behalf of the ICT, we feel extremely proud and honored to have played an active part in the process of obtaining the EDGE international certification by the Centro de Convenciones de Costa Rica, even more because this distinction is granted by the Green Building Council Costa Rica and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the latter being an entity associated to the World Bank,” expressed Gustavo Alvarado, Tourism Manager of the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism (ICT).
Alvarado added that this award reaffirms our commitment to sustainability as a central pivot of our tourism model, a pivot that has even positively permeated from the conception of the Centro de Convenciones de Costa Rica to the new events that will take place in the compound as part of the strengthening of the marketing strategy and the positioning of the country in the tourism niche related to the organization of events, congresses, and incentives.
Ana Quirós, president of the BGCCR indicated that “currently, there is a tendency of acknowledging the importance of intelligent cities, which go together with the concept of sustainability and must be always present, and in this context, the CCCR has always managed to commit to this country model necessary to boost a sustainable business.”
EDGE certifies buildings and projects, both in the design stage and postconstruction, in six classifications: residential, commercial, hotels, hospitals, offices, and educational.
This certification system concentrates on the evaluation of three performance parameters of the buildings: energy consumption, water consumption, and energy incorporated in the materials. For these, EDGE uses a local data base (on local construction practices, service costs, climate data, among others) and basic data on the building to present a local base line, which will be compared to the real design of the project. In this comparison, if a 20% or more reduction of the three parameters is met, the project is EDGE certifiable.
In the case of the CCCR, Rojas added that other measures incorporated to the energy are the reduction of the glass proportion on the outside façade, sun protection devices, roof insulation, variable frequency units in the air handling units (AHU), variable speed units in the pumps, efficient lights in interiors, exteriors, and occupation sensors.
With the water, the building has low consumption faucets in sinks, efficient urinals, low-flush toilets, and rain water recollection systems.
