They practise what they preach in Ballymena, Co Antrim. The town's new environmental interpretive centre uses solar power and biomass as energy sources, a reed bed cleans up its waste water and it has an organic market garden.
The £10 million sterling ecos Millennium Environmental Centre opened on August 7th and is intended to attract up to 70,000 visitors a year. It was co-funded by Ballymena Borough Council and the UK Millennium Commission.
The council had 150 acres available, located just off the M2 and situated on the flood plain of the River Braid, which runs through the town. Originally the officials simply wanted a town park, but the project evolved and grew. Finally, support from the Millennium Commission allowed the council to undertake a much more ambitious project, a full-blown interpretive centre.
"The whole project is about sustainability," explains project architect Mr John Lee of WDR & RT Taggart, Belfast. For him, the centre symbolises the growing importance of sustainable thinking in our increasingly urbanised world.
The 3,000 square metre ecos centre tells the story of how the park was developed in an environmentally sensitive way, says Mr Lee. Earlier signs of human intervention, such as old field drains, were removed and the flood plain was allowed to return to its natural state. Some farming continues on the site, however, with the centre's own organic market garden and grazing for cattle and sheep.
Removal of drains has allowed both wet and dry meadows to emerge, supporting the species of plants and animals that naturally occur in these habitats. Woodlands were also a feature of the original landscape and these are returning, Mr Lee says. "The Woodland Trust took over areas of better ground where scrub is already regenerating into mini-forests."
No effort was made to thwart the natural tendency of the River Braid to flood, he says, but there was one major alteration to the original topography - an artificial lake. This was added in order to provide fill material for the purpose-built footbridge that links ecos to the town centre just 10 minutes away. It also provides a "new habitat", Mr Lee adds, which has doubled the number of bird species found in the park.
The park is open all day every day, fulfilling the council's initial requirement, Mr Lee says. "It is a town park for Ballymena, but what we did in designing it was [that] we introduced an environmental theme. Because we did it to improve the environment, we decided to display it in the building."
Radial galleries are positioned around a central core and each of these captures a particular story within the landscape, telling the tale indoors but providing views of the actuality outside.
The Taggart team worked in co-operation with the London-based exhibition design consultancy, Land Design Studio, to achieve the high level of integration between building, landscape and environmental themes.
These themes are also echoed strongly in the design of the ecos centre itself. It employs a range of technologies to deliver as little environmental impact as possible, Mr Lee says.
The roofline, for example, supports 2,000 solar panels that provide enough electricity and hot water to provide about 15 per cent of the centre's annual demands. A high level of insulation has been included to make it thermally efficient and, wherever possible, waste heat is recycled back into the building to reduce overall energy demands.
This process is best seen in the building's combined power and heat (CPH) system, which Mr Lee says provides another 35 to 40 per cent of the centre's energy. The park includes a 20-acre stand of willow saplings which are harvested in a three-year cycle to provide bio-mass material for the CPH system. The willow cuttings are chipped and dried, and their energy is recovered by gasification, he explains. The gas is scrubbed to allow it to burn cleanly, and this helps drive the CHP system, with waste heat being reused in the building. The system is supplemented with natural gas when necessary.
The building provides a large exhibition space, small office units for environmental groups, a shop and a cafe, so obviously it produces waste water. This is also dealt with in an environmentally sustainable way, using a 1,000 sq m reed bed.
The sewage flows into a septic tank to settle, and effluent is then discharged to the reed beds for natural cleaning. "The effluent breaks down organically in the reed bed and is pumped on to fields to be polished over the ground," Mr Lee says. Even this last step is done with efficiency in mind. "It is pumped on to the willow fields to encourage growth of the bio-mass."
During the summer, ecos is open from 9.30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Saturday, and from 12 noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. A family ticket for two adults and up to four children is £11.70 and children aged under five are free. Individual adult tickets are £3.75, and there is a special rate of £2.80 for senior citizens, the disabled and children under 16.