MyCREST - Malaysian Carbon Reduction and Enviromental Sustainability Tool

The Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) recently conducted a road show on MyCREST. They went all over the country and visited many major industry players with hope to educate many people on this new development.

What is MyCREST actually?

MyCREST is an acronym and stands for Malaysian Carbon Reduction and Environmental Sustainability Tool. It is a tool that guides every stakeholder involved in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of building by adopting sustainable development practices. It is also aims to quantify the actual carbon emission at every stage of the building life cycle.

MyCREST aims to guide, assist, quantify and thereby reduce the built environmental's impact in terms of reduced carbon emissions and other environmental impact. It also aims to integrate socioeconomic considerations related to the built environment and urban development.

AIM of MyCREST:

To integrate carbon assessment criteria and reduction strategies into the matrix of sustainability resulting in a combined sustainable assessment rating system for the built environment;
To provide a quantifiable carbon assessment within a holistic sustainable rating system by integrating and extending the present criteria into life cycle–linked performances and parameters;
To extend the present green building assessment into life- cycle impacts and its quantification.
To combine both carbon emission and sustainable performance factors into a combined criterion linked to the design, construction, commissioning and operations of buildings.
To be in line with the aims of Low Carbon City Framework (LCCF) by Ministry of Energy, Green technology, and Water (KeTTHA).

Objective of MyCREST:

To quantify the environmental impacts of the built environment in both carbon reduction and sustainable impact terms.
To ensure the best environmental practice according to global and local standards and targets.
To maintain and improve a database of impacts and best practice case studies to reduce carbon emissions in design and life-cycle impacts.
To raise awareness of the life-cycle impacts of the built environment and its components.
To balance robustness with ‘durability’ and practicality and ease of use.
To produce a tool flexible enough to be used by all stakeholders, consultants and contractors and for all building types and scenarios.
To balance long and short term targets.
To balance environmental and ‘human’ socio–economic issues.

Key Definitions

As a working definition list in MyCREST, there are selected definitions, which are outlined as follows:

Certification Phase

This refers to the three certification awards, which have their own scorecards based on the three main phases of project going for MyCREST certification;

Criteria

This refers to the ‘category’ or ‘group’ of points and based on which total points can be calculated and totalled

Sub-criteria

This refers to term a ‘point’ or credit. One point or sub-criteria can have several strategies to achieve the point

Tools

Typically known as ‘scorecards’ in other green building systems. In MyCREST, these basic ‘tools’ are then ‘combined’ to make up the full scoring plan for a project going for MyCREST certification. This refers to the list of maximum points or subcriteria in MyCREST (Sustainable(S), Carbon Reduction (Cr) and Carbon Impact(Ci), which an applicant can choose from for any project.

Overview

This sustainability rating tool is required to assess construction building impact in terms of carbon emission throughout the building's life cycle. A holistic assessment approach involving carbon emission reduction and practices that have an impact on carbon usage including socioeconomic well being has been integrated in this tool.

MyCREST Certification

In the system, every development will have three types certifications awarded at each stage:

Design
Construction and
Operation and Maintenance).

Each tools is the basic of the 'star' rating for each phase of the project . MYCREST awards different star rating to the different phase of the project and will award on overall star rating. In this way, all three phase of the project is assessed.