This session explores how demountability can move from aspiration to standard practice across development, design and construction. Drawing on live project experience, we examine the fundamental barriers to reuse, including inaccessible fixings, adhesives and vertical transport constraints, alongside the critical role of informed, ambitious clients willing to programme additional time for recovery.

We unpack how robust pre-demolition audits can set realistic reuse targets, align site teams and engage supply chains early—ensuring progress over perfection. The discussion highlights manufacturing challenges and emerging solutions, from modular internal glazing and carpet tiles to take-back schemes and remanufactured furniture, all requiring a shift in entrenched industry behaviours.

Finally, we consider how installation methodologies must evolve, with designers and clients embedding demountability into briefs, specifications and leasing strategies. Better record-keeping and clearer fit-out intentions can significantly increase material recovery, reducing waste and unlocking long-term value across building lifecycles.

Vast quantities of post-consumer glass from commercial buildings are still lost to landfill due to contamination, logistics, and cost barriers. This session shares key lessons from implementing a new, scalable pathway to recover end-of-life architectural glass and return it to new building products. Through strategic partnerships with clients, upskilling the deconstruction supply chain, and stewarding recovered material, Saint-Gobain has developed a cost- and time-effective closed-loop solution.

This initiative is called Glass Forever, illustrated in a six-step circular flow:

This real-world initiative illustrates how industrial innovation and collaboration can unlock material circularity, reduce CO₂ emissions, and strengthen climate resilience across the built environment.

1 Victoria Street is a historically layered site undergoing transformation into a responsible and future-focused workplace. In partnership with Mitsubishi Estate and architects AHMM, the project reimagines a building last redeveloped in the 1960s into a sustainable office space that responds sensitively to its heritage context in Westminster. 

Originally constructed as luxury flats in the 1840s and later adapted for office use following World War II damage, the building is now being renewed to meet contemporary commercial and environmental demands. Up to 52% of the existing structure will be retained by volume, significantly reducing embodied carbon, while new extensions, high-performance façades, upgraded MEP services and reconfigured cores comply with modern regulations while reducing climate risk to the asset. The scheme introduces active retail at ground level, high-quality office space above, and biodiversity-rich green terraces at upper levels. Together, these interventions demonstrate how adaptive reuse can balance heritage, sustainability and long-term urban vitality.

171 Victoria Street is an iconic 412,000 ft² redevelopment and a good example of how sustainability has become core investment risk management, not an add-on. From day one, this project was aligned with Westminster’s strong retrofit-first policy, so the real question wasn’t whether to reuse the building, but how deep the retrofit needed to be to unlock planning certainty, future value and market appeal.

In the early feasibility stages, multiple redevelopment routes were tested through whole life carbon modelling, using environmental impact as a decision-making tool rather than a reporting exercise. The selected strategy retains the substructure and most of the superstructure, dramatically reducing embodied emissions and, critically, de-risking planning in a highly constrained borough. In this context, retrofit really is the new prime.

From an investment and agency perspective, the ESG strategy isn’t about collecting labels. Certifications like BREEAM, NABERS and Fitwel matter because they respond to occupier demand, but they sit alongside practical circular economy thinking, designing for adaptability, embedding material passports, and planning for end-of-life value. Each building element is treated as a recoverable asset, not a future liability. The result is an office designed to perform - environmentally, commercially and beyond its first life.

Energy performance is where the net-zero retrofit challenge will be won  but only if ambition is matched by delivery. Using Tower Bridge Court (TBC.London) as a live case study, this panel explores how one of London’s first all-electric, net-zero carbon retrofit workplaces translated energy ambition into measurable operational performance through building systems.

Bringing together the developer, architect and engineering perspectives, the discussion examines how energy targets were defined early, embedded into design, and delivered in practice. From all-electric strategy and operational energy performance to embodied carbon reduction and occupier wellbeing, the panel focuses on the decisions that mattered  and the trade-offs that shaped the outcome.

The Portman Estate’s relocation of its head office to One Great Cumberland Place presented an exciting opportunity to reimagine the workplace. The project aims to set a benchmark for sustainable commercial interiors across its 110-acre Marylebone estate.

The retrofit of the 8,400 sq ft office prioritises collaboration, wellbeing, and exemplary environmental performance while working within an existing base build. Sustainability informed every design decision including:

Embodied carbon was measured and recorded to support The Portman Estate’s One Planet Action Plan, achieving carbon neutrality with minimal offsetting and setting a replicable benchmark for future workplace retrofits.

So what is Regenerative Design?

Regenerative design is increasingly discussed across the built environment sector, yet it is often unclear what it means and how it differs from other sustainability practices within construction. 

This session will provide a concise, accessible introduction to what regenerative design is, what it aims to do, and why it can’t be reduced to a checklist. 

Drawing on insights from the Regenerative Design Lab, a cross-sectional learning programme for built-environment professions, the speakers will share what emerges when people work with regenerative principles over time and what it means for practitioners trying to make change today. 

Obsolescence in buildings is driven by far more than technical performance. In practice, much end-of-life concrete remains structurally sound, yet current waste management approaches are usually limited to downcycling, perpetuating high material demand and the embodied carbon associated with new concrete. 

In a ground-breaking trial the team at British Land, 3XN GXN and Arup have conducted a pilot project to challenge that paradigm. As part of the redevelopment of the Euston Tower in-situ concrete has been harvested for reuse as structural “precast” planks in a new application. A concrete slab was carefully extracted and tested in collaboration with the University of Surrey, demonstrating sufficient structural performance for reuse in a new floorplate. Initial analysis indicates carbon emissions approximately one-third of those associated with new precast elements, alongside clear benefits of waste reduction and raw materials use. This session will share the lessons learned to date, covering challenges such as fire safety, logistics, and regulatory acceptance. 

A truly innovative approach to the reuse of concrete, it demonstrates the potential to realise scalable reuse techniques and transform how concrete buildings are designed, constructed, deconstructed and reused.

The UK Green Building Council will present an update on the built environment sector’s progress on meeting their net zero trajectory. This panel will review the evolving UK regulatory landscape which aims to deliver decarbonisation of buildings. With the Future Homes and Buildings Standard now published but not coming into force until 2027, questions remain over delivery timelines and industry readiness, despite clear intent to mandate low-carbon heating and high energy efficiency in retrofitting existing buildings

Attention will also turn to the uncertain trajectory of Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) for non-domestic buildings, where tightening requirements have been signalled but lack firm policy clarity, creating investment ambiguity. 

The panel will examine progress on clean heat adoption, including electrification and heat pumps, and how policy continues to balance ambition with delivery challenges. We will also discuss the legislation & guidance that built environment professionals can follow to ensure that we can make more progress towards our Net Zero targets. This discussion will provide critical insight into regulatory progress, gaps, and the path to decarbonising buildings in the UK.

Real estate fund managers need to address the challenges presented by UK and EU disclosure regulations relating to sustainability: a dual regulatory horizon. 

From July 2024 the UK Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) regime has been mandatory for UK-authorised funds for UK retail investors.

Since March 2021 the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) applies to any fund marketed to EU investors, including non‑EU funds. The SFDR regime is now being reviewed by the EU regulators - with the prospects of significant reforms: in particular, SFDR Article 6, 8 and 9 disclosure requirements being replaced by SFDR 2.0 product labels, expected to take effect in 2028 or onwards.

How should the managers strategically prepare for SDR and SFDR 2.0?

What are the key data and other expectations as well as, with SFDR 2.0, timelines?

How can compliance with the regulations, meeting investor expectations as well as other market drivers assist with: