Going green puts firm in the black

Participating in the construction of “the greenest building in the UK” has helped raise the profile of Cygnum, a timber-frame company based in Macroom.

The company has engineered, manufactured, and erected the timber-frame structure for the €12.5m Norfolk Enterprise Centre, at the University of East Anglia. It has been called the UK’s greenest building because it is the first commercial building in Britain to achieve both Passivhaus and BREEAM standards, the most rigorous of environmental performance measurements.

Part of Cygnum’s role in building the 465m sq building involved processing 650m cubic of locally produced timber in order to create the frame. Winning the tender against stiff competition in the UK, one of the company’s strengths was that it had the technology and skill to process Corsican pine, a type of timber normally used for fencing.