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Minto’s LEED portfolio tops 6,500 apartments

4 years ago

An Oakville, Ont. apartment is the latest Minto property to receive LEED certification by the Canada Green Building Council. This third-party acknowledgment is “something that we’re very proud of,” said senior building performance specialist Joanna Jackson.

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The latest Lufa Farms venture is purported to be the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse, roughly 164,000 square feet, situated on what may seem to be the most unlikely of farm settings, atop a seemingly soulless, unremarkable-looking warehouse in St-Laurent.

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FortisBC will soon be producing renewable natural gas (RNG) from wood waste – a first for North America. On April 30, 2020, the company announced that it was teaming up with REN Energy International Corporation (REN Energy) for this new endeavour.

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The Canada Green Building Council has announced the winners of the 2020 Leadership and Green Building Excellence Awards. The awards recognize individuals and organizations who have demonstrated outstanding industry leadership and made significant contributions in advancing green buildings in Canada.

Building Lasting Change

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Mass timber office space will be added to a Beatty Street warehouse in an exciting heritage revitalization plan by Reliance Properties. The building at 837 Beatty Street was built in 1911 and was then known as the Anglo-Canadian Warehouse.

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The Chalk River Laboratories campus in Ontario is improving aging infrastructure on the site, including the construction of three mass timber buildings, including its six-storey, 100,000-square-foot Business Hub now under construction.

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Waugh Thistleton Architects were ahead of the pack, designing the first significant tower made of Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). At the firm’s new project at 6 Orsman Road in London you can see CLT everywhere, a textbook demonstration of low-carbon design.

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Former central banker Mark Carney is taking his crusade for sustainable investing to one of the world’s largest money managers, joining Brookfield Asset Management Inc. with a mandate to create funds focused on both generating profit and saving the planet.

Energy Profiles

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An Ottawa software engineer hopes to turn his passion for protecting the environment into a billion-dollar technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Mike Kelland, an entrepreneur and outdoorsman, is one of the driving forces behind Planetary Hydrogen.

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Walmart Inc. has cut 230 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of its supply chain in the past three years, putting the world’s largest retailer on track to achieve its 2030 emissions goal, by compelling suppliers to rethink their operations.

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Participation in the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark Assessments has grown 18 per cent this year to cover the ESG performance of over 1,700 real estate and infrastructure assets despite the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s testament to an industry-wide commitment to ESG.

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One silver lining of this horrific moment is the rise of loans, bonds and other financial instruments linked to sustainability outcomes. In this sense, “sustainability” is broadly defined to include environmental as well as social issues.

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The manager of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport has been awarded a 2020 Environmental Achievement Award in the Environmental Management Category from Airport Council International-North America for its “20/2020” Sustainability Strategy to reduce GHG emissions 20 per cent (from 2006 levels) by 2020.

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For five months, businesses across Canada were shuttered. Employment tanked. People were afraid for their families, children and elders. Statistics Canada reported nearly two million job losses in April, and despite recent gains in June, unemployment remains high.

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Fewer Canadians support a ban on single-use plastics since the COVID-19 outbreak, a new survey by Dalhousie University suggests. Between 2019 and 2020, the proportion of Canadians who support plastic bans and regulation has dropped from 70 per cent to 58 per cent.

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Construction crews have already dug 400,000 cubic metres of soil. Eventually 1.4 million cubic metres — enough to fill the Rogers Centre — will be moved to create a natural-looking, 1.5-km valley connecting a “renaturalized” Don River mouth with Toronto’s inner harbour.

Smart Density

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Johnson Controls, the global leader for smart and sustainable buildings, announced it will launch a comprehensive suite of digital solutions, called OpenBlue Healthy Buildings, to make shared spaces safer as people begin to return to offices.

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Savvy solar installers have their eye on the nanogrid market — the next phase in solar plus storage — as a potentially large market for their industry. The number of nanogrids is small now, but energy forecasters anticipate a significant increase.

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Multifamily housing is a hard nut to crack for solar and battery developers. Shell-owned Sonnen and Wasatch Group say bundling the value of solar and storage for tenants, property owners, outside investors, utilities and grid operators can make it work.

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A report by the U.S. Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis urges financial regulators to protect the U.S. economy from the systemic risk of climate change. Steven Rothstein, managing director, Ceres calls it “much needed and much appreciated.”

Industry Events