Commercial Office Buildings and Shopping Centres

• Manufacturing
• Commercial office buildings and shopping centres
• Hotels, clubs, restaurants and pubs
• Hospitals and health facilities
• Tertiary education facilities
• Schools
• Councils
• All business sectors

Commercial buildings in Sydney use one fifth of all business water in Sydney – or nearly 75 million litres of water every day. This figure includes water used by commercial office buildings, shopping centres and the many cafes and restaurants that are located within them.

Is your building water efficient?

Sydney Water has developed water consumption benchmarks for office buildings and shopping centres after analysing the results from audits completed at 12 shopping centres and 31 office buildings. The benchmarks can tell you at a glance if your building is operating at peak efficiency, if it is likely to have leaks or if you have opportunities for cost effective water efficiency measures.

Office Building Benchmarks

Benchmark	Offices with cooling towers	Offices without cooling towers (extrapolated figures)
Median market practice with no leaks	1.01 kL/m2	0.64 kL/m2
Economic best practice (median of implementing water saving projects with two year paybacks)	0.84 kL/m2	0.47 kL/m2
Very well managed office building	0.77 kL/m2	0.40 kL/m2

Shopping Centre Benchmarks

Benchmark	Value
Median market practice	1.70 kL/m2
Economic best practice (median of implementing projects with two year paybacks)	1.68 kL/m2
Very well managed shopping centre	1.35 kL/m2

How to save water in commercial buildings

Sydney Water audits show that the main areas of water use in commercial buildings are:

• Leaks
• Amenities
• Cooling towers
• Shops

Click for a larger image	Click for a larger image
Typical water distribution in a commercial office building (including leaks)	Typical water distribution in a shopping centre (including leaks)

For detailed information on how to save water in commercial buildings, you can customise a best practice guideline document for your business using Sydney Water's customised water management publication tool or look at the ready-made best practice guidelines for water conservation in commercial office buildings and shopping centres (PDF - 17.46MB) . Both guidelines provide information on:

• benchmarks for water use in commercial buildings and shopping centres
• how to implement water conservation projects
• alternative water sources
• Water saving checklist to identify water saving opportunities.

The best practice guidelines for cooling towers (PDF - 1.19MB) gives detailed information on how to reduce water consumption in your cooling tower.

To find out how the EDC Business Program has helped commercial office buildings and shopping centres to save water see our case studies.

Other resources

The National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) is a rating tool that measures how water efficient existing buildings and homes are. Visit http://www.nabers.com.au/ for more information.

Contact Us

Use our contact form for membership enquiries and questions about the program.