Technical Information

This page summarises how the Portakabin Group can help your organisation minimise its carbon footprint through the manufacture and supply of new accommodation.

Designing buildings

• Our ‘Design for Manufacture’ philosophy maximises the benefits of off-site production and the assembly of buildings in highly efficient, factory controlled conditions.
• We use state-of-the-art software to carry out environmental analyses of our modular buildings to ensure energy efficient solutions.
• Our integrated approach to design has the benefit of state-of-the-art building simulation software allowing us to value engineer carbon efficient and project specific modular building designs.
• The latest low and zero carbon (LZC) technologies can easily be accommodated in our buildings.
• We use intelligent design to engineer waste-generating operations out of the manufacturing process.

Manufacturing buildings 

• Labour efficiency is greater in a factory environment than on building sites that use temporary labour and are subject to inclement weather.
• Our buildings are manufactured in a quality controlled factory equipped with the latest production technology to ensure consistently higher quality and reducing the need for rectification and consequential energy use.
• Our manufacturing process is energy efficient and there is minimal use of hot and mechanised processes. The insulation material used in wall and roof panels contains no HCFCs, and has an ozone depletion potential of zero to help protect the environment.
• We are committed to using materials from certified sustainable and managed sources.
• We recycle materials wherever possible – 65 per cent of waste generated in the off-site manufacturing process is recycled.
• Up to 67 per cent less energy is required to produce a modular building compared to a traditionally-built project (source: Arup Research and Development).

Siting buildings 

• Our building systems reduce the reliance on temporary site labour, which further improves quality.
• Vehicle movements are up to 90 per cent less than traditional site-based construction, reducing congestion and carbon emissions (source: Mtech). The off-site process generates very minimal packaging requiring disposal.
• There is significantly reduced waste on site. It has been stated that around 13 per cent of materials delivered to traditional construction sites are never used and go straight into the waste stream. Research carried out by WRAP has shown that off-site construction generates up to 80 per cent less waste compared to site-based building methods.

Managing and maintaining buildings

• The use of pre-finished materials wherever possible reduces maintenance.
• Our steel-framed building systems achieve a higher degree of precision which minimises air leakage leading to improved thermal efficiency, lower running costs, and reduced carbon emissions.

Refurbishing and relocating buildings

• Our modular buildings can be refurbished and relocated to another site – saving more than 90 per cent in embodied energy use compared to an equivalent ‘new-build’ modular building (source: Arup).

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