The Big 5 recognises green initiative through Gaia Awards

The Gaia Awards recognise those who stand out in their efforts to develop environmentally friendly products and services for the construction sector.

Named after the mythical Greek goddess of the earth, the awards provide a platform for leading green products and services and feature more than 30 products and services.

The winners of this year’s awards were announced at ITP’s Construction Week Awards 2008 earlier this month.

“Products and services exhibited at The Big 5 exhibition that reduce the impact on the environment were eligible for the Gaia Awards,” said Simon Mellor, vice-president construction for show organisers dmg world media.

“The Big 5 is committed to advancing high-performance, energy efficient green building solutions and environmentally friendly technologies.”

Nominations were received from the 2900 exhibiting companies at this year’s Big 5 and a panel of judges representative of the community awarded 27 medals of merit and one Gaia gold medal.

The overall winner was SolaSteel manufactured by Coolsheild International and distributed by Tiger Profiles.

Highly commended and silver medal winners were Fermacell Gypsum Fibre Boards manufactured by Xella Germanu and marketed by Excel Technical Distribution, and Liquid Plastic Green Roofing Systems manufactured by Liquid Plastics.

The judges built a matrix around eight different criteria, companies were allocated points out of 10 for each of these criteria, which gave a total score of 80, this then allowed the judges to rank the companies.

The company with the single highest score was awarded the Gold Medal (most valued product).

There was a threshold for each category of silver and bronze, of highly commended products and services, to the Green category which were the finalists.

All these finalists will be seen and showcased at The Big 5 as part of the show’s green initiatives.