‘Doing the right thing’: Morguard earns more LEAP awards

‘Doing the right thing’: Morguard earns more LEAP awards

Two recent awards for Morguard Investments Ltd. properties in Calgary and Vancouver illustrate the company’s commitment and focus on sustainability practices – a road it embarked upon about eight years ago.  The company was recognized by Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan with two Leadership in Environmental Advancement Program Awards (the HOOPP LEAP Awards). Morguard had earned 14 of the awards across nine categories since the program’s initiation in 2012.

Sustainable Biz Canada

International coalition pushes for performance-based building codes

Passive House Canada and Vancouver’s Zero Emissions Building Exchange (ZEBx), participated in the UNECE High Performance Building Initiative at UN Headquarters in New York to establish the International Centres of Excellence on High Performance Buildings. Also present were the UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed, the City of Vancouver, representatives from Ireland, Penn State University and the North American Passive House Network.

Canadian Architect

Plans for Toronto’s first vertical forest take root

Toronto architect Brian Brisbin wanted to look behind the curtain on one of the world’s buzziest buildings, Milan’s Bosco Verticale, two towers that are widely acknowledged as the world’s first vertical forest — green buildings designed specifically to counteract the smog and heat of a city. The problem — the apartments, built about four years ago, are privately owned. Brisbin couldn’t get access to poke around the residents’ terraces.

Toronto Star (Subscription required)

Ecology Ottawa wants green roof bylaw

Ecology Ottawa is calling on the city to catch up with Montreal, Toronto, Chicago and other North American jurisdictions by passing a bylaw to force building developers to include roofs with gardens and greenery and encourage the green retrofit of existing roofs.  The city currently lacks the authority from the province to pass a bylaw that would require builders to make a percentage of their roofs green.

CBC

An all-glass, bird-friendly building in Fredericton, NB

A new commercial office building in Fredericton, N.B.’s downtown core will feature bird-friendly design. The first three storeys of the seven storey glass curtainwall building will contain a dot pattern etched onto the glass which is expected to prevent birds from crashing into the reflective windows.

Construct Connect – CBC – Construct Canada

Green buildings boost health, productivity and value for investors

Buildings account for one-third of the world’s greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations.  The buildings where we live, work and play have a profound impact on our health and well-being — and high-performance, sustainable buildings are rising to the challenge and creating built environments that are part of the solution.

GreenBiz

New green space coming to King-Spadina area

A new green space is coming to Toronto’s King-Spadina neighbourhood, after a vote by city council. Councillors approved a motion last week by Coun. Joe Cressy, who represents Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina, asking for funding to transform a public parking lot at Spadina Avenue and Adelaide Street into a new park. “Downtown Toronto is the most parks-deficient area in the entire city today,” Cressy said. “If you’re going to raise a family in a high-rise, the park becomes your backyard.”

CBC

	World Green Building Week – Sept. 24-30, 2018
	This year, we want everyone, everywhere to take action and commit to making a change in the homes they build, lease or live in. We can all do something to make our home a greener, healthier and more energy efficient home. Let’s start now.
	World Green Building Council

 

ASHRAE guide outlines changing energy sector

Are you prepared for distributed energy resources, energy storage, and smart grids? A new publication, Building Our New Energy Future, from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) will help professionals to prepare for the challenges and opportunities of designing efficient and grid-responsive buildings within the changing energy sector.

Construction Canada

Why data centers are slow to adopt microgrids

Whether you’re surfing the web at work, shopping for a new dress on your tablet or paying those pesky utility bills with your app, you’re utilizing a company’s IT system. That company has chosen to house their network and data somewhere – an on-prem data center, a colocation facility, or increasingly, a cloud vendor like AWS or Azure.

Microgrid Knowledge

NY floats plan to double community distributed generation

New York is outstripping the nation in the development of community distributed generation, and now it’s got a plan to more than double installations. Also known as shared renewables, community solar or solar gardens, the approach creates communal local energy meant largely to benefit apartment dwellers, those with shady roofs or other obstructions to installing onsite renewables.

Microgrid Knowledge

P.E.I. Energy Corp. wants more wood-chip heating systems

The P.E.I. Energy Corporation is seeking proposals for wood-chip heating systems that would be housed in approximately 25 government-owned buildings. The province currently buys heat from 29 privately-owned biomass systems.

CBC

	Passive House Canada conference 2018
	Passive House Canada is collaborating with UN Economic Commission for Europe Committee on Forests, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and Canadian Wood Council, to hold concurrent conferences in Vancouver, November 7 to 8, 2018.
	Passive House Canada Conference

 

Manitoba unveils cap-and-trade plan

While nearly all Manitoban residents and companies will simply pay a flat tax $25 per tonne of carbon emissions, a select few large industrial emitters will pay taxes based on an entirely different framework. On Monday, the province unveiled more details of its “Made-in-Manitoba” climate plan, including a cap-and-trade style carbon tax for the province’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters.

CBC – Winnipeg Free Press

Ottawa eases carbon tax thresholds to help industry

Large industrial companies in Canada will face an easier carbon limit when Justin Trudeau’s government starts putting a price on emissions next year. Most firms that produce 50 megatons of carbon dioxide or similar levels of pollution a year won’t face any penalties until their emissions reach 80 per cent of the average within their specific industry.

Financial Post – Globe and Mail (Subscription required)

China’s eco-city opens doors to B.C. wood homes

Though it’s B.C.’s second-largest market for exported lumber, China isn’t known for its love for wood housing. But that might be changing by the end of 2019, when 3,000-plus people in China’s fourth-largest urban area will live in more than 860,000 square feet of residential space built almost entirely out of lumber from British Columbia.

Business In Vancouver

St. Paul aims for zero carbon in all buildings by 2050

Officials in St. Paul, Minn., announced that the city has set a zero carbon goal for 2050. City-owned buildings are to hit that target by 2030, with all buildings following suit by mid-century. A two-year study of carbon emissions within the city found that 52% were related to physical structures.

BDC Network

Green Building Rating Systems

CaGBC Accelerator Program helps with switch to zero carbon

Since launching late last year, CaGBC’s Zero Carbon Building Program has already certified two buildings to ZCB-Design and one to ZCB-Performance – proving that getting to zero carbon is easier than you think. With 2030 targets less than 12 years away and added pressure on governments to strengthen building policies and codes, it is inevitable that your portfolio will need to address its carbon output sooner rather than later.

Canada Green Building Council

Market Trends and Research

The business case for addressing ‘earth overshoot’

Aug. 1, marks this year’s Earth Overshoot Day, the day of the year by which humanity has exhausted its annual resource budget. Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 1, humanity used more from nature than the planet’s ecosystems are able to renew in the entire year. Running out of planet is a risk. And we believe the answer is “one-planet prosperity.” What does this mean?

GreenBiz

Climate extremes set a record in fall 2017

The latest Actuaries Climate Index data reported Wednesday by organizations representing the actuarial profession in Canada and the United States show the five-year moving average of climate extremes across the two countries reached a new record high of 1.19 in fall 2017. The seasonal Actuaries Climate Index value increased to 2.00 in fall 2017, from the previous level of 1.59.

Globe Newswire

Forest fires will become worse: Expert

As hundreds of wildfires rage in Ontario and B.C., one expert is warning the increased forest fire activity being experienced this year is about to become a regular feature of Canadian summers. “The science is very clear,” Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at the University of Guelph, said. “Fires are now burning larger than they ever have before. They’re getting more intense than they have been in the past. This is only projected to get worse.”

CTV

Market trends and research

New generations align ventures with their socially responsible values

For the responsible investor, opportunities come in all shapes, sizes and returns. At the Sustainable Brands Expo in Vancouver, one of those opportunities comes in the form of a giant leaf. Having nothing to do with cannabis, the leaf belongs to the Empress Splendor tree, the fastest-growing tree in the world. 

Business in Vancouver

Residential Real Estate

Passivhaus Trust announces nominees for the ‘Oscars’

The UK Passivhaus Trust has just announced its shortlist for the 2018 UK Passivhaus awards, to be given out in October. They start their press release with the claim that the awards are “Often dubbed ‘the Oscars for building performance’” I certainly hope not, because the Oscars have been getting it wrong since How Green Was My Valley beat Citizen Kane in 1941.

TreeHugger

Residential Green Buildings

How California is pioneering ‘energy justice’

Diana Guzman, a 30-year-old widow, works in a peach packing plant in California’s Central Valley. She lives with her two children at Casas de la Viña, a nonprofit housing development for farmworkers in an agricultural region buffeted by poverty and some of the nation’s most polluted air. Not long ago, the family lived in a drafty, dilapidated ranch building rife with mold and insects.

Yale 360

Government Programs and Incentives

Speakers ponder effects of gas tax cut on congestion, transit

The pledge of Ontario’s new Progressive Conservative government to lower gas taxes by 10 cents a litre was called regressive and counter-productive to efforts to reduce congestion and fund new transit infrastructure by speakers addressing a recent Toronto transit forum. The speakers were from the worlds of academia, business, the non-profit sector and construction advocacy attending an event hosted by Transport Futures.

Construct Canada

Corporate Sustainability

Speaking of climate change: A CSO’s guide

As sustainability professionals, we learn quickly how to adjust our messages to the broad variety of audiences we engage. Fortunately, we have gotten to the point where the best strategy to discuss climate change is usually to treat it as the fact it is, discussing it with the confidence with which we approach the laws of gravity or the risks of smoking.

GreenBiz

CSR clauses in buyer-supplier contracts provides insight

EcoVadis, a leader in business sustainability ratings for global supply chains, recently announced the results of its study “Sustainability Clauses in Commercial Contracts: The Key to Corporate Responsibility,” finding that, while CSR clauses are widely used and have strong potential for improving supply chain sustainability performance, current practices need improvement to truly impact change.

Green Lodging News

Transit, bikes and transportation

How to replace the private car with something better

In a circular economy there’s no place to park a gasoline powered SUV. In a recent post, TreeHugger Ilana asked Is endless growth a problem? The answer to that question is complicated; much of the problem is the kind of growth going on now, which is incredibly wasteful of resources and which makes stuff that doesn’t work very well.

TreeHugger

Water Management

Toronto getting $400-million overflow tunnel

Toronto is finally getting a relief line, but it’s not one that’s going to move people. Instead, a new $400-million overflow tunnel to be built along the Don River will stop combined sewage and stormwater from overflowing into the river and Lake Ontario during storms and serve as a back up for an existing 60-year old sanitary sewer.

Toronto Star

Waste Management

China’s mixed recyclables ban forces rethink in UK

China’s recently-imposed restrictions on importing recyclable material have had major repercussions on waste management in the UK – but the biggest pain is yet to come. The financial implications of the ban have predominantly been felt by local councils and waste management suppliers who are no longer able to obtain rebates on mixed recyclables that used to be shipped to China and are instead being hit with higher disposal costs for the same materials.

Environmental Leader