Canada hosts the best of Sustain Ability

“Are you heading for the annual ‘eco-love-in’?” Gary Ramsay hadn’t even got off the plane from Manchester when he was marked out as a ‘greeny’. He was with 23,000 other visitors to Toronto as the host city for the first ever Greenbuild to be held outside of the USA, from where he reports…

Flicking through my Expo Guide was obviously a dead give away. My fellow passenger was on his way from Philadelphia to do some biz on solar panels and learn more about Biophilia. He said he was expecting to busy. Very…

No surprises why Toronto was chosen. It is arguably the coolest Canadian city with a vibrant music, film and social scene, but in the words of Thomas Mueller, President and CEO of the Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC), Toronto is the ‘centre of green building innovation in Canada’.

Greenbuild is the annual shindig laid on by the US Green Building Council and the underlying theme for 2011 was ‘NEXT’ – as in ‘what’s next for green building’. Four days of networking, seminar sessions, green building tours, big name speakers, plenary events and even a snazzy Green Film Festival, saw the Metro Convention Centre bursting at the seams.

As the most densely populated Canadian Province, Ontario is often the focal point for a greener Canada. Toronto currently has $32 billion of new construction and retrofit projects under way. With 3,000 LEED-certified projects under the city belt, plus the enormous waterfront and downtown office tower retrofits all seeking LEED Gold as a minimum, you don’t have to walk far to see large-scale sustainable construction work changing the Toronto skyline.

With a massive natural forest resource, Canada has always had a natural leaning to sustainability with the timber industry playing an enormous role, but the interest, creation and adoption of green technologies in more urban environments is now becoming formally established, maturing and becoming more and more diverse.

Toronto has a raft of city-wide policies that are driving forward the eco-building agenda and importantly rewarding it, with a number of grants and financial helping hands from the Sustainable Energy Funds, Energy Retrofit Programs and the Toronto Atmospheric Fund (tackling greenhouse gases and air pollution) to exciting incentives for Green Roof installation – the Toronto Green Roof Bylaw is unique in Canada and demands any new developments with a gross floor area of 2,000sq m or more to install a green roof. There are now over 160 green roofs in Toronto with 71 more in planning. That is real definable progress.

The CaGBC is heavily supporting innovation across the next generation of buildings. Thomas Mueller said: “As we look forward to what’s next we want to encourage ‘living buildings’ and PassivHaus technology, these are two leading concepts but they are only part of the solution. We need to find ways to engage a broader market and include more existing buildings and also demonstrate performance and measurable outcomes.” Mueller believes that ambitious environmental targets will not be achieved on a: “building by building basis but through neighbourhoods, communities and on a city scale.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. This is a struggle for anyone working in the green-tech industry. Time will tell but the impact and levels of energy performance plus any quantifiable savings need to be more visible in all sectors, particularly for consumers with better labelling. When we are all more energy literate we can then all make better informed choices.

Of course not everywhere has the vast expanse of Lake Ontario on the doorstep.

Instead of traditional chillers and cooling towers to regulate the temperature of much of Toronto (including the Metro Convention Centre) a district cooling system uses the water from the bottom of Lake Ontario to cool the buildings on the network. Finished in 2004, the Deep Lake Water Cooling System, designed and built by Enwave District Energy, is pumping naturally cold (4°) water from a depth of 83m, through 40km of pipe work, buried in bedrock 150ft below the surface, through heat exchangers to the city’s water system. It is now close to producing 75,000 tons of alternative energy to power Toronto’s air-con systems.

Globally, natural and financial resources are being consumed quicker than they can be replenished. So, what next? From many at Greenbuild Canada the message circulating was a very simple one – a better environment means a better economy. It may have been preaching to the choir, but there is a strong correlation between green energy and sustainable technologies to job creation and better business. In the midst of world recession and painful austerity who is going to argue with that?

All images in this feature courtesy Gary Ramsay.

For more on Green Roofs in Toronto and the Green Roof Bylaw read the November/December issue of sustain’, available to order HERE

For more information on Toronto’s green polices and the Canadian Green Building Council visit: www.cagbc.org

Greenbuild 2012 will be held from November 13-16 in San Francisco. For more information visit: www.greenbuild.org