Chan Man-wai, vice-president, projects and facilities, said that the three phases of the park were designed to incorporate green concepts. Phase2, which began taking tenants three months ago, has eight buildings. Six have been built. The last two will be finished in April.

'When we were building Phase2, we decided to build only two main roads so people could enjoy their environment without being disturbed by the sounds of traffic,' said Dr Chan.

'We also incorporated a building integrated photovoltaic [BIPV] system. These are panels that are solar cells that are integrated into the curtain wall, so that they can generate electricity. And the electricity generated by the BIPV is fed into our electric grid.'

Another visible feature is the use of certified sustainable timber. Timber itself is an ecologically sound material and environmentally friendly when harvested and replanted in a sustainable manner.

'In Phase2, we also have two energy towers based on the district cooling concept,' said Dr Chan. 'All the buildings within Phase2 are cooled and heated by these two buildings which house the air-conditioning and heating units.

'Pipes leading from these two buildings are laid underground. There are two underground tunnels that house the cooling or heating pipes that feed into the other buildings.'

So, if a laboratory or office requires air conditioning, the cold water from the pipes is used to blow cool air into the office. In the same way, hot water, run in a circle to all the buildings from one of the two towers, is used to heat the buildings.

'Roughly we can reduce our energy by 10 per cent and, in terms of the maintenance costs, we estimate we can save 30 per cent. This is our anticipated saving, because the buildings have only started to be occupied over the past three months.

'We share the same air-conditioning plant, which means we don't need a separate air-conditioning plant on all of those buildings. This means that, particularly in the evening when there is [an] actual need for heating and cooling for random needs - say for example, there might be one tenant who needs 24-hour cooling and another who only needs it on intermittently in another building - they don't have to turn on all the cooling.

'So we can have a communal cooling and heating system, and in our experience, save quite a bit of energy. It also minimises the vibration on top of the roofs, because normally if you have an air-conditioning unit on the roof to cool the building, it causes vibration. As all the buildings here involve research and development where they require minimal vibration, this system helps us to minimise vibration.'

Another environmental feature at the park is the Automatic Refuse Collection System - which was purchased from a Swedish company. All the garbage collected from Phase1 and 2, is collected by a system of ducts that channel all the garbage into a single building. The garbage is separated into recyclable waste and normal waste and then compacted. The recyclable waste container is for paper, because it is largely an office environment. the park is now collecting more than 3,000kg of paper per month that can be recycled.

'Each building has a room with two hoppers on each floor where the worker physically puts the recycled and non-recycled waste into the separate hopper or metal container linked to the pipe leading to the waste container,' said project manager Ir Stewart Wan.

This then is sucked with a vacuum - so the main centre for the waste disposal system acts like a huge vacuum cleaner down to the huge containers, where the waste is compacted and collected once a month by a truck.

The refuse collection system will also be used later for Phase3.

In addition to the environmental concepts incorporated into its buildings, the corporation was very keen to contribute in the green technology area generally, said Ken Hui Kin-nam, vice-president, marketing and admission.

'In addition to having a sophisticated infrastructure at the park that shows off green technology, the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation also sponsors events to promote environmental technology,' he said.

This included a solar car competition this month, which saw the involvement of 160 schools, university students and firms.