Building work has started on South Gloucestershire Council's £29-million eco-friendly office complex in Yate.

The offices in Badminton Road are set to open in 2010 and house some 900 staff.

Once completed, the building will be the council's third major office centre after Thornbury and Kingswood, which will both remain in use.

But the complex, not far from Yate railway station, will allow the council to pull out of rented premises and sell off some of its own buildings.

Cash raised as a result will help the council fund the complex as well as save money in the long-term. It estimates the building will save council taxpayers about £1.3m a year.

South Gloucestershire said the building project was part of a wider scheme looking at how its accommodation was used, with the aim of improving efficiency and the way it provided its services.

But it still plans to keep open a number of smaller community-based offices and one-stop shops to make it easier for people to pay bills or get advice or information close to their homes.

Councillors joined staff and contractors at the site of the offices – at the junction with Stover Road – for a ceremony to mark the start of what they said would be a prestigious "gateway" building for Yate.

It has been designed to incorporate a series of energy-saving features, such as lighting control systems, water-saving measures and solar collectors for the hot water supply.

Rainwater will be collected for the flushing of toilets and the main heating system will be a woodchip biomass boiler with a natural gas back-up boiler. Architects have been asked to include carbon dioxide-reducing measures and it is also planned to have a wind turbine on site to generate some power.

The site for the complex has been unused since a number of council houses were demolished more than 15 years ago.

Site clearance has been taking place in recent weeks, but the ceremony was held to mark the start of building work.

Kier Western are the contractors for the project and operations director Martyn Osborne joined council chairman Brian Freeguard and his council colleagues on site to see the scheme get under way.

Allan Higgs, the council's executive member for corporate resources, said: "We are determined to work more efficiently so we can provide improved services and better value for money. This new building will play a major role in helping us achieve those aims."