Swire Properties held two celebrations, one in Hong Kong and another in the Chinese Mainland, to acknowledge the hard work and dedication to sustainability of our GPP tenants.

At the GPP Forum 2024 in Hong Kong, more than 170 tenant representatives and sustainability partners across our Hong Kong office portfolio participated. The event began with a Green Ideas Exchange Workshop. Part of the GPP Academy and co-hosted with the Business Environment Council, the workshop brought together participants who exchanged industry knowledge and best practices and networked with each other. This session was followed by the GPP Panel and Awards Presentation. After remarks from strategic leaders from Swire Properties and several of our tenants, five tenants were recognised with Sustainable Fit-out awards, and 76 were honoured with Sustainable Operations awards. Some also received special recognition for achieving exceptional energy efficiency and waste diversion performance.

Key 2024 GPP highlights from participating tenants (who reported electricity and waste data for both the 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 cycles) in our Hong Kong portfolio include:

In the Chinese Mainland, tenants holding over 120,000 sqm of office space, or 36% of our occupied Chinese Mainland portfolio, have signed the GPP – more than tripled the area held in 2023. The annual GPP Awards Ceremony was concurrently held in November across three cities, celebrating the substantial progress that our Chinese Mainland office teams have made towards our GPP targets. More than 30 tenant representatives in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing joined the ceremony, with some sharing their sustainable best practice knowledge and experience. Twenty-eight Sustainable Operations awards were given out and one tenant received the Sustainable Fit-out award.

In Hong Kong, the GPP Academy had another successful year. This partnership with the Business Environment Council offers office tenants curated learning experiences to tap into extensive industry knowledge, encourages the sharing of best practices, and inspires impactful actions – all with the aim of enhancing tenants’ abilities to improve their energy, water and waste reduction performance.

In 2024, the GPP Academy conducted four workshops in Hong Kong. The first workshop focused on the global landscape of waste reduction and circularity, equipping tenants with the knowledge to navigate evolving waste management practices. The second, part of the GPP Forum, was the “Green Ideas Exchange”, which facilitated networking and the exchange of insights among over 90 participants regarding sustainability leadership, challenges and best practices. The third workshop, “Biodiversity 101”, provided education on the critical importance of biodiversity, introduced Swire Properties’ biodiversity strategy and a guided tour of the newly opened Taikoo Square. Lastly, a year-end celebration featured a green building tour of Six Pacific Place, the latest addition to our Hong Kong office portfolio, highlighting its sustainability features. Over 60 participants explored its green spaces and innovative design elements.

2024 also saw the launch of the GPP Academy in the Chinese Mainland. Three events were held during the year, including the HKRI Taikoo Hui building tour that brought participants on a tour around the development’s innovative energy-saving facilities, the Taikoo Hui Guangzhou “Climate Change and Me” event that provided education on how companies can bring green office and lifestyle practices to life, and a tour of The Loop at INDIGO in Beijing that introduced the portfolio’s green building features. In total, 51 tenant representatives from more than 25 companies participated.

We are committed to enhancing our capacity building offerings for GPP tenants. In the Chinese Mainland, a survey was conducted with 13 GPP tenants regarding their current sustainability status, including existing programmes and systems. The survey identified the challenges they face in achieving sustainability goals and gathered information on their preferences for engagement activities. The results will inform the design of future capacity building workshops and enhance programme implementation.

The GPP community has grown rapidly in Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland. Riding on this momentum, the GPP ramped up communications during 2024. In late June, we developed and launched a dedicated GPP website and a regular newsletter to showcase our tenants’ sustainability efforts and highlights for the growing GPP community.

The website aims to be a digital platform that fulfils four key objectives:

Every two months, we issued a GPP e-newsletter which includes a feature interview with a tenant’s senior management representative, and a feature article on recent happenings for the GPP community. Three e-newsletters were sent out during the year, and the series is expected to continue in 2025.

With more F&B tenants participating in the GKI, we are expanding our capacity building support to the Green Kitchen community by promoting best practices and knowledge sharing. In 2024, we began collaborating with a Hong Kong-based F&B sustainability consultancy, and organised three capacity-building workshops for our F&B tenants as well as portfolio management, building management, technical and hotels teams.

The first workshop, held in April, aimed to raise awareness amongst Swire Properties’ colleagues regarding the updated GKI as well as addressed challenges encountered during tenant engagement, emerging global food sustainability trends and best practices to promote sustainability in the F&B industry.

The second and third workshops engaged more than 60 participants from 10 F&B groups, Swire Hotels and industry practitioners. Participants were familiarised with the new focus areas of the enhanced sustainable fit-out and operations scheme through an interactive exercise where they assessed their own restaurant operations against the new scheme, identifying strengths and areas for improvement. The workshop also invited industry practitioners to share insights on F&B sustainability topics such as on sustainable packaging, sustainable procurement and regenerative agriculture. The session wrapped up on a high note, with participants networking over cocktails crafted from locally sourced ingredients.

In the Chinese Mainland, a “Green Kitchen Salon” was held in November at Taikoo Li Chengdu. 17 attendees from 14 F&B companies took part and discussed GKI technical requirements and the potential economic benefits that a F&B tenant could enjoy if energy-saving kitchen equipment and sustainable menu design are incorporated.

In 2024, we initiated discussions with market stakeholders to establish sustainability partnerships in the retail sector. Based on the growing popularity of both the Green Performance Pledge and Green Kitchen Initiative, we began formulating a Green Retail Partnership Framework, focusing on sustainable shop design, data sharing and performance improvements for shop operations.

Moving the concept forward, in November, Swire Properties formed a strategic partnership with a luxury retail conglomerate to enhance ESG performance across their stores, offices and F&B locations in the Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong. The new partnership was formalised at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai, representing the comprehensive tenant-landlord partnership in driving sustainability. The collaboration marks significant progress in the shared sustainability vision and commitment of both companies, setting an industry benchmark for landlord-tenant collaboration on sustainable business practices.

The strategic partnership will engage the conglomerate’s brands for their new stores and offices, including future upgrades to existing stores and the fit-out of new stores across six cities in the Chinese Mainland (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Xi’an and Sanya) as well as Hong Kong, and for their existing office premises at Taikoo Place. The total gross floor area for all existing stores and offices is around 50,000 sqm.

We will engage the brands in the GPP, GKI and the new Green Retail Partnership with the aim of achieving reductions in energy, water and waste. The partnership will also introduce an Eco-design Checklist outlining specific sustainability recommendations for new retail premises.

Launched in 2017, The Loop began with the establishment of our SD exhibition centre in Devon House at Taikoo Place, which features a recycling centre, food waste composter, reverse vending machine for plastic bottles and an “eco-art” installation. The 4,000 sq ft space aims to encourage tenants and the wider community to “close the loop” by incorporating sustainable practices into their business operations and daily lives.

In 2021, we began extending The Loop’s community environmental engagement concept to other properties to promote urban farming at our other The Loop spaces:

In 2022, INDIGO in Beijing unveiled another unique The Loop space – a multipurpose sustainable development centre with interactive displays to engage employees, tenants, business partners and the community in SD initiatives.

In recent years, we have conducted several urban farming workshops for office tenants and held public awareness activities for the community at The Loop spaces across our Hong Kong portfolio.