Solarlux wins environmental award

Industrial estate 2.0: Solarlux won over the jury of the Environmental Award with its motto, “Designing corporate premises with ecological value”. Sustainability and environmental awareness have played a key role at the north-west German company since day one.

At Solarlux, manufacturer of moving window and facade solutions, environmental awareness has been an important issue ever since the company’s foundation 37 years ago. Its first product, the bi-folding door, was designed based on the concepts of renewable energy generation and sustainable construction. When it built its new headquarters three decades later, the family-owned company made sure that sustainable building technology was incorporated into the sustainable design. Solarlux’s dedication to this cause has now been rewarded, as the region’s local conservation fund and the Haarmann Foundation of Osnabrück have presented the company with their Environmental Award for 2019.

As an industrial company, here at Solarlux we see it as our duty to ensure that we balance out the environmental footprint our business inevitably leaves. Together with a garden and landscape architects’ bureau, our company has built a park-like area that can act as a new habitat for large numbers of plants and animals. The initiative was driven by a desire to maintain the beautiful natural landscape of our cultural headquarters in Melle, Germany. In spite of the high-quality design, the project includes appropriate measures to compensate for its impact on our environment, with 520 trees, 4,800 square metres of shrubbery, and 4,600 square metres of green ground cover across 13 hectares, plus 8,000 square metres of green roof space. The initiative also includes green courtyards, insect hotels and wildflower lawns with beehives, which Solarlux uses to produce its own honey.

The architecture of the buildings is designed to blend into the natural surroundings. For example, we have built our high-bay warehouse on the lowest plot of ground on the entire site in order to minimise its impact on the skyline. The outer walls of all the buildings comprise our core product, the bi-folding door, as well as our cero sliding window, in order to keep them transparent and allow our staff to work surrounded by greenery. The rainwater drainage system for the car parks has also been completely overhauled. Water-permeable surfaces were included in the design, and wild flowers were planted on unused patches such as fire service access roads to channel precipitation back into the natural water cycle.

Solarlux plans to use its prize money to increase its investment in environmental protection. There are plans to build a storks’ nest on the Campus so that the storks who scour the surrounding grassy areas for food have somewhere to raise their chicks. The company is also running an ecological innovation competition among local schools, encouraging students to develop projects that actively help to protect the environment and promote sustainability. Of course, Solarlux hopes that the prize will motivate even more local companies to start thinking this way and invest in conservation schemes.