GSE Design and Build

Just what is involved in a “clean room” above and beyond the obvious fact that it is just that – clean? A clean room has a very specific definition, stated in the NF EN ISO 14644 standards, as follows:

“Room in which the concentration of airborne particles is controlled, which is built and used so as to minimize the entry, production and retention of particles inside the room and in which other relevant parameters such as temperature, humidity and pressure are also controlled.”

There is increasing harmonization among the good environmental practices which are applied at the design, construction and operations phases of non-residential buildings. However, the number of references for assessing and certifying environmental performances of buildings continues to increase!

These certification systems, which can be private or associative, are shown in the following table:

In France as abroad, property, industrial, logistical or development projects are born every day in spite of continuously reduced availability of suitable land.

To meet the problems of unsuitable land, the construction professionals often use soil consolidation techniques. One of them, pre-loading, consists of using the weight of a fill to compact the soil.

Oblog stands for the Observatory for Supply Chain Management and Logistics Real Estate.

The purpose of Oblog is to "gather and produce monitoring indicators, research and benchmarks for the sector” in order to inform professionals of the major trends and developments in the logistics sector in Europe.

Based on anticipation and flawless worksite scheduling which sequenced tasks with no wasted time, the method GSE applied in Spain on a logistics platform project for ProLogis was able to build 40,000 m² of wood frame in 5 and ½ weeks. 
See the successful adventure in images:

Week 1, week 2, week 3...

...week 4, week 5...

Water runoff from parking lots and roadways creates a real risk of soil and ground water pollution. Rainwater pounding the roadways and running off their surface can be laden with hydrocarbons and sludges that cannot be discharged directly into the natural surroundings. This requires a water treatment system.

The hydrocarbon trap separates the hydrocarbons which remain suspended in road runoff water...

The all-in-one solution for greater quality and faster installation.

The principle : construction of hotels, clinics and nursing homes requires the installation of a large number of bathrooms. These specific units require very fine work which involves many building trades working in particularly small spaces.

For the Hayley Belle-Eglise (France) operation – a conference centre with accommodations of 150 rooms, GSE preferred the solution of prefab bathrooms over the traditional approach. This entailed shifting work normally done on the construction site upstream to factory production.

The advantage is increased time savings on the work site and enhanced quality.

Producing and installing a concrete frame for a classic 20,000-m² warehouse generates emissions of approximately 587 tons-equivalent of CO2.

Production and erection of a wood frame (glulaminated) from eco-certified forests*, for the same building actually stores approximately 410 tons-equivalent of CO2.

The savings between the 2 solutions therefore comes to approximately 997 tons-equivalent CO2. This is the amount of CO2 given off by a truck driving some 665,000 kilometres, or the amount of CO2 emitted by the average French consumer over a period of 125 years.

* A growing forest absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere:
1m3 of wood harvested and processed = 1 ton of CO2 stored.

Given the context of global warming and the implementation of solutions for reduced greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, GSE has been working for over a year on a joint project with the “ADEME” (French Environmental and Energy Control Agency - Agence de l'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l'Energie), focusing on a method to calculate the carbon scorecard – expressed in CO2 tons-equivalent released into the atmosphere – throughout the various phases of a logistics platform: construction, use, demolition. For GSE, the objective of this research is to propose an ecological building with a low carbon-producing profile.

Question: what parts of the office building eat up the most energy?
If you say heating… you might not be right!
According to a recent study conducted by the CCR, (Compagnie des Contractants Généraux), for the typical office building, the trend appears to be significantly reversing. Read on.

Unlike what is commonly thought, wood is a material which has very good fire-resistant properties, if it has sufficient thickness.