Landmarks with a sustainable inner life

Published on 29/09/2020

During the day a shimmering blue diamond, at night a rainbow-colored crystal, the Hyderabad headquarters of Novartis is an imposing architectural landmark on the city’s skyline. But the real beauty of the shiny monolith does not lie in its impressive exterior. The magic happens within, like with many new buildings in the global office, lab and production network of Novartis.

“When we started to build the complex in Hyderabad in 2013, the goal was not only to create a top-notch facility that would house our fast-growing employee base in India,” says Jagadeesh Kumar, a facility manager who is helping oversee the Novartis Knowledge City, as the building is known. “We wanted to build a modern and sustainable workplace living up to the highest environmental standards.”

While a lot of attention was paid to the style of the complex, which has since become an architectural icon in this central Indian city, most efforts went into creating an energy-efficient building for the roughly 6000 associates who are responsible for providing services across a wide range of the global research, development and production activities of Novartis.

“The building excels through the application of state-of-the-art eco-friendly technology, including a smart cooling system and LED lighting,” Kumar says, detailing some of the technical highlights of the building. “Furthermore, we also installed solar panels, which provide more than 100 000 kilowatts of green energy every year. All of this helped us to receive the highest energy standard and has helped create a blueprint for other office buildings in Hyderabad and India.”

The Novartis Knowledge City has been classified as a LEED Platinum building by the Indian Green Building Council, which is part of the World Green Building Council. This non-governmental group rates the sustainability of new buildings. LEED Platinum is its highest grade. A few years ago, the Shanghai Campus of Novartis received the same distinction for its smart use of energy and resources.

Other recently constructed buildings and complexes which were awarded similarly high ratings include the Novartis research campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as other buildings in the United States, Mexico, Panama and Columbia.

“Given our ambitious environmental goals, we aspire to the highest building quality throughout our network,” says Irina Stefanova, who leads the global Novartis Real Estate and Facility Services function. “This not only includes working with the most sustainable materials and the use of green energy, it also entails carefully selecting the location of our buildings to minimize commuting and encourage the use of public transportation.”

The Hyderabad complex, for example, can be easily reached by public transport. In addition, the site’s leaders have introduced an electric vehicle fleet for employee transportation and are working to accelerate this service as demand among associates is rising. Furthermore, the building’s garage has more than 60 charging stations for electric cars, which are on the rise across India, where urban air pollution has become a major challenge.

The focus of Novartis on environmental issues is not new. In fact, the company has been at the forefront of setting high ecological standards in its building network for almost two decades and recently set itself new company-wide goals to become carbon-neutral by 2025 and reach plastic and water neutrality by 2030.

When Novartis decided to rebuild its old headquarters in Basel in 2001, which back then was looking like a traditional production site with fuming smokestacks, a busy river port and a functional railway connection, Novartis worked together with Italian architect and city planner Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani to create an eco-friendly science campus.

Unlike an American university campus, which is usually located outside the city, Lampugnani envisioned an urban learning center integrated within the city. While the Italian architect put a strong focus on the quality and aesthetic appeal of each building – in Basel, office and lab buildings were designed by some of the world’s most renowned architects, such as Frank O. Gehry and David Chipperfield – Lampugnani was also a strong advocate for sustainability.

As part of his masterplan, Lampugnani not only stressed the importance of clean energy, but also pushed for open spaces and the creation of natural habitats to strike a balance between nature and industry. Among other things, he suggested the creation of parks and wooded areas as meeting zones to allow the more than 7000 associates on the Novartis Campus to meet and relax outside the office.

“As part of the Campus construction, in which we were guided by the highest building standards in Switzerland, we also planted more than 2000 trees in several parks across the Campus,” Stefanova said. “With this concept, we have not only provided lush recreational zones for our associates, we have also created green zones that work as sort of mini carbon sinks and help us reduce CO2.”

Green mindset

While Novartis has built several massive carbon sinks across the globe over the past 15 years, planting roughly 20 million trees in countries such as Argentina, China and Mali, the company is also motivating its own associates to embrace a green mindset and push projects of their own to help make the company and its communities more sustainable.

In Basel, a group of activists has created the so-called Green Team, which has taken a series of actions, including, for example, the reduction of single-use plastic on the site, while associates in Hyderabad have created several initiatives to promote environmental awareness in the company and the city, explains Sona Saptarshi, who heads the Health, Safety and Environment efforts in Hyderabad.

“The idea behind these initiatives is not only to raise awareness among our associates, but also to give them the opportunity to learn and allow them to take the lessons learned back home and thus help the entire community,” Saptarshi says, pointing to efforts such as reducing PET bottles and plastic bags across the site.

Associates welcome such actions. During Plant the Future day, for example, more than 1000 associates in Hyderabad bought saplings to plant at home. Another initiative saw more than 1000 associates paint their own cotton bags, which they now use instead of plastic bags when they go to the grocery, while, in another workshop, associates also learned to turn kitchen waste into compost for use in miniature gardens at home.

Meanwhile, other sites have made similar efforts. In Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, for example, associates have removed all plastic straws, lids and single-use dispensers from canteens, while in Nuremberg, Germany, to name another example, PET bottles have been replaced with service points and glassware.

“As part of our real estate and facility services strategy, we have a strong focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, including the construction of geothermal energy systems or the participation in cutting-edge wind parks through power purchasing agreements,” says Irina Stefanova. “But another important part of our efforts also includes the participation of our own associates.”

Through this form of empowerment, which has been pushed ever since Vas Narasimhan took over as Chief Executive Officer of the company in 2018, Novartis expects to add more momentum to its environmental efforts and gain the trust of people in the communities in which it is active.

“We are convinced that everyone at Novartis can make a contribution to the achievement of our overall environmental targets,” Stefanova says. “In that sense, our buildings are not just beautiful shells in which people work, but they are places of opportunity in which our associates can become their best selves and contribute to the success of their communities.”

In Hyderabad, meanwhile, this message is resonating among associates, many of whom are not only proud to work in one of the city’s most impressive landmarks, but actively support their community to make it greener and more sustainable.

In 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak, several Novartis associates participated in a major cleanup of nearby Lake Langar Houz, together with other organizations. As one associate who participated at the event said on the company’s social media platform Yammer: “It was really encouraging to see such activity ... Waiting for the next one!!!!” Once the coronavirus crisis is over, such activity is likely to make a difference in Hyderabad and other locations where Novartis is active.