Developers want to make their shopping centres sustainable, but there is only so much they can do – retailers need to play their part too. So are they really interested, asks John Ryan

Two weeks, two shows, one message: if you were a marketing executive, that might be the way in which you would summarise the toings and froings of last week’s Mapic gathering in Cannes and the BCSC’s Tyneside melée the week before. Although various topics were covered, there was a green strand that ran through both shows as the retail property industry sought to emphasise its eco credentials.

At the BCSC event, statements of sustainable intent and calls to action featured strongly. At Mapic, besides a number of talks on being greener and sustainable development, there was even a green lunch, which consisted of rather more than mixed watercress and lamb’s lettuce.

A cynic might be inclined to take a step or two back from all this and come away with the perspective that the hype was as much about advertising greenness to potential retail tenants as it was about a real desire to do the appropriate thing. Two questions emerge from such an overtly emerald-tinged agenda. In a sector that, by its very nature, is characterised by a conspicuous use of resources, is real change under way? Equally, how much difference can be made? Any new developments could be seen as merely adding to existing carbon footprints, greenhouse gas emissions or whatever other environmental yardstick might be applied.

Paul Cornes, chair of the BCSC Sustainability Task Force and head of sustainability at Prupim, thinks a green mindset is well embedded in those charged with developing new shopping centres. According to Cornes, a sustainability policy has been in place at Prupim since 2002. He cites The Belfry Shopping Centre at Redhill in Surrey as an example of what can be done. “We put together a strategy to look at the impact we could have on a shopping centre and the results were so good that we said we would roll this out across all of our properties,” he says.

At Cribbs Causeway, which is jointly owned by Prupim and Capital Shopping Centres, several initiatives implemented to save energy have been extremely effective. In the centre’s car park, for example, every third fluorescent tube was removed and the upper inner surface of the light fixture was painted white, which meant that the same amount of light was emitted using less energy.

Another change at Cribbs Causeway, Cornes says, is that the shopping centre does not use a physical cooling system during the summer. Instead, heat is released from the interior through a series of vents, helping cooler air to circulate around the structure through convection, much like a sash window.

Land Securities is ramping up its green credentials too. Head of retail project management Derek Baillie says that the developer’s Livingston shopping centre has an EFTE roof – a transparent covering that performs the same function as a glass roof. Unlike a glass roof, though, it took almost no energy to manufacture. “This is obviously a big tick in the box,” he says.

Success stories such as these might make observers think that energy conservation and lower carbon footprints are a manageable feat in UK shopping schemes. But that would be to overlook one salient aspect – the tenants.

Retailers letting the side down
Baillie is blunt about tenants’ progress to date. “The league-one players, such as John Lewis and Marks & Spencer, are taking some real steps. But whether those further down are doing enough is another matter. There’s definitely a long way to go and the only way that things are likely to change is by statute,” he says.

This is hardly encouraging news. Although M&S is an anchor tenant in numerous schemes in the UK, there are vast numbers of retailers that fall into the not-doing-enough category. While developers and shopping centre owners may be making stringent efforts to clean up their carbon act and reduce their environmental impact, it appears that many tenants are doing little, if anything at all.

Even less encouraging is a survey of 250 retailers released at Mapic by Cushman & Wakefield, which seems to confirm this. 57 per cent of those surveyed said they do not monitor the energy or water that they use, nor the waste that they create.

In the long term, the case for change is clearly a financial one. Cornes says the simple low-cost measures that have been introduced at Cribbs Causeway slashed electricity usage by 25 per cent and gas by 17 per cent. “It didn’t cost the landlord much and it didn’t cost the tenants anything,” he adds.

Changes like this may be a step in the right direction, but Baillie says Land Securities’ centres are not controlled environments and that retailers “do their own thing”. In practice, that means that, in most modern shopping centres, consumers standing on the threshold of any of the stores are likely to encounter a rush of hot or cold air, depending on the season.

To an extent, this is a historical anomaly. Retailers have always been left to their own devices when it comes to dealing with the temperature inside their shops and most have chosen to install individual cooling and heating systems, evidence of which can normally be found on the shopping centre’s roof.

Baillie says developers are looking at ways in which they might be able to introduce centrally controlled heating and cooling systems at new schemes to govern their tenants’ store temperatures. This would make dealing with carbon emissions more straightforward.

It seems, therefore, that in the minds of developers and centre owners, there is something of a divide between what is done to make the physical fabric of a scheme leaner and greener and what retailers are doing within their stores.

The situation is similar at an international level. At Mapic last week, the ICSC issued a statement calling for all new developments across Europe to be brought in line with the BREEAM standard: a long-established method of assessing the sustainability of a building.

The great bulk of shopping centres in this country will need retro-fitting if they are to become greener. By its very nature, retro-fitting will have a greater impact on the costs of running a shopping centre than developing a scheme where sustainable practices have been built in.

Steve Morris, director of design and build at Urban Outfitters, which has 13 stores across Europe, says: “In the early days, in places like Glasgow, we used halogen lighting [which is inefficient and environmentally unfriendly]. That has already been replaced and now we try to use recycled materials when we are building a new store.” Urban Outfitters is fairly typical of the league-one retailers referred to by Baillie that are striving to make environmentally sustainable stores an everyday part of what they do.

Morris also highlights the different standards that apply across Europe’s many borders. He recalls how, when Urban Outfitters was building its store in Copenhagen last year, it found out that retailers in that country are not allowed to install electrical over-door heaters. Instead, because retailers need to be able to heat their premises in a cold country, a facility for heating stores from a centralised hot water plant is in place. This kind of centralised initiative has yet to make its way to the UK, but it must be uppermost in the minds of people such as Baillie when they cite the go-it-alone nature of retailers’ arrangements in shopping schemes.

This is not to say that there is a total schism between beneficent developers and renegade retailers. Morris says: “Sustainability is certainly a factor for most retailers that I’ve come across in the past few years. Ten years ago, Body Shop was pretty much out on its own, but most companies now have some sort of policy.”

But whether they choose to follow it or not is another matter. Morris adds: “Some retailers are paying lip-service [to sustainability], some are kicking and screaming – and will be all the way – and some are genuinely interested. We are interested.”
Talk to almost any developer, landlord or retailer at the moment and it won’t be long before sustainability crops up. Many talk a good game and underpinning their words is an appetite for change and a wish to do things differently.

However, standards vary considerably across the continent. The last six major schemes opened by Portuguese shopping centre owner and developer Sonae Sierra, for example, are all certified by ISO 14001 – an internationally recognised standard for sustainable development. And the fact that Sonae Sierra places great store by this is an indication of how hard the green agenda is hitting home with the big players in the retail property industry.

And is the UK leading the way? Almost all observers agree that, while it is in not in the vanguard – that seems to be the preserve of the Scandinavian nations – it is making rapid strides in the right direction. For most of those involved in the sector, however, the problem of ensuring that tenants play ball looks likely to be an ongoing headache.

The difficulty will be in persuading cash-conscious retailers that it is in their best interests to buy into new ways of heating, cooling and lighting shops. It looks as if the easy wins in the public areas of the UK’s shopping developments are nearing completion, in a substantial number of cases at least. With the exception of a number of high-profile companies, the battle to win over tenants is still to be fought and won.

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