Biomedical Campus, Cambridge

This £500 million advanced pharmaceuticals HQ was the flagship project within in the new Oxford-Cambridge Arc area. The developer specified the building to have enough occupancy for 2,300 scientists who are set to work on world-leading pharmaceuticals products.

Because the project was located in an area which was classified as ‘seriously water stressed’ by the Environment Agency, the developer had a responsibility to achieve water neutrality within their new pharmaceutical discovery building. The developer also wanted to achieve BREEAM Excellent Status through incorporating rainwater harvesting, heat pumps, innovative insulation techniques and a green roof.

Stormsaver were tasked by the Consulting Engineers to provide a rainwater harvesting solution for the site. The design had two main challenges to overcome – the first being the wish to collect rain from the green roof and associated demand for high-quality water. Secondly, the scale of the building resulted in a large number of WC facilities all spread across the campus.

Our design team were able to provide a unique solution to overcome all these challenges. This came in the form of three 80,000 litre capacity storage tanks which supplied rainwater to various toilet blocks.

These three systems came in the form of our Automatic Backwash System which filters rainwater to 35 microns and cleans itself automatically. This was ideal for this site due to the need for high quality water, highly reliable operations and reduced manual maintenance interventions.