Recent Articles
Airdrie builds Canada’s largest municipal rooftop solar grid
Canada’s largest municipal rooftop solar grid in Airdrie
The City of Airdrie just outside Calgary is now home to Canada’s largest municipal rooftop solar energy installation and mayor Peter Brown is enjoying the bragging rights. The 1.55-megawatt, 3,800-panel system provides renewable energy to Genesis Place Recreation Centre.
Building the case for more mass timber construction
Faced with the challenge of diminished lumber supply and lower prices, the British Columbia government has made investing in higher-value-added products like engineered wood a priority, betting that supporting mass timber construction can be a winning proposition for the industry.
Net Zero Energy-Ready building winners announced
A mass-timber office project in Vancouver and a four-storey timber-frame rental apartment in West Kelowna are among 11 winners of the province’s pilot Net Zero Energy-Ready Competition. The winners will receive up to $390,000 each to put toward completing their buildings.
Toronto GBC highlights campuses for green building
The Toronto Chapter of the CaGBC June event featured green retrofits and new green buildings at Humber College, Sheridan College, the universities of Guelph and Toronto as well as Western, Fanshawe College, George Brown College, and host Mohawk College.
Algae’s voracious appetite for carbon emissions
VIDEO: By feeding industrial emissions from Ontario factories to algae, Pond Technologies in Markham, Ont. helps reduce carbon emissions and then uses the algae it grows to create everything from plant-based protein to health supplements.
Canada leads the way in carbon capture
Half of the provincial governments are now in the hands of conservative premiers opposed to carbon pricing, arguing instead that technology – to reduce emissions and then capture and store what’s leftover – is a better solution to climate change.
Capturing carbon and climate-change hopes
• Globe and Mail (Sub. required) • The Star Phoenix
One of Canada’s largest science projects is humming away on the south Saskatchewan prairie, capturing thousands of tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide every month and storing it underground where it should remain buried for eons.
A Federal challenge to accelerate battery innovation
The Charging the Future Challenge will help accelerate the most promising Canadian battery innovations from lab to market. Five finalists will be eligible to win up to $700,000 to develop their battery prototype with one grand prize of $1 million.
Montreal lab makes used plastic new again
Four years ago, the Lavergne Group surprised tech company HP with a system where printers could be tossed whole into grinders and the bits efficiently sorted into neat piles by colour and type, creating bins that separated black and white plastic.
The looming challenge of solar waste
DEFG, a firm focused on customer strategy and experience in the utility sector, released research developed as part of Solar IQ titled “Solar End Stage: Planning and Risk Scenarios for Removal of Solar.”
Academics limit air travel to reduce carbon emissions
• CBC
Conferences are a big part of life for many professors but a growing number are concerned about the environmental impact of all of the air travel. Hundreds have signed a petition asking universities to reduce the amount their employees fly.
CPWS calls for dramatic increase in conservation area
• CBC
As of 2019, 11.8 per cent of Canada’s land mass had been set aside for conservation. Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPWS) says Canada’s goal should be to almost triple that amount by 2030 and ultimately protect half the country’s land mass from development.
Climate change costly for B.C. condo owners
Facing an insurance hike that could be north of 25 per cent, Vancouver strata members are learning they can’t escape the threat of catastrophic weather in a warming world, even though they have not directly endured recent extraordinary floods or fires.
Quebec flood areas: new map, new “mistakes”
• La Presse • Montreal Gazette
The new map of “zones d’intervention spéciale” (ZIS) where a moratorium forbids construction in flood-prone areas still include “errors”. Five cities are affected by the measure, even though they were never been hit by the floods of 2017 and 2019.
Salt Spring Island water shortage a call for change
• CBC
Drought and freshwater shortages have plagued Salt Spring Island, due to the warming climate because most of the island’s water supply comes from rainfall. Lack of rain is causing the two main lakes on Salt Spring to dry up.
Canada has weak wildfire science despite high risk
Thousands of homes and vast swaths of forest were consumed by the Horse River Fire that ripped through Fort McMurray in 2016. The fire’s extreme intensity and the speed of the fire illustrated a stark risk that experts had worried about for years.
CDP calls out companies failing to disclose forest data
A new CDP report finds 70 per cent of 1,500 companies fail to provide forest data. The Money Trees report says brands including Dominos, Mondelez, Next, and Sports Direct are among those that didn’t disclose effects on forests worldwide in 2018.
Company directors a target of corporate climate litigation
• GreenBiz
Directors of RWE had probably never had heard of Huaraz, Peru before 2015. But Saúl Lliuya, a mountain guide and farmer there, sued RWE for climate-related damage. A court in Hamm, Germany agreed with Lliuya’s argument and let the case proceed.
Chevron aims for world’s lowest-emission LNG plant
Chevron wants to modify plans for a liquefied natural gas export facility on Canada’s Pacific Coast to an all-electric design it says will produce the lowest GHG emissions per ton of LNG of any large project in the world.
Air Transat HQ earns ISO environmental certification
Air Transat, Canada’s No. 1 leisure airline, has achieved ISO 14001:2015 certification for its head office in Montreal, the culmination of a long process implementing a system for environmental management and improvement of its sustainability practices.
Industry Events
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Sustainable Finance Forum 2024
Nov 28 2024
to Nov 29 2024
Shaw Centre, Ottawa -
Zero Carbon Building Standards Interactive Workshop
Dec 10 2024
to Dec 12 2025
Online -
FCM’s Sustainable Communities Conference 2025
Feb 10 2025
to Feb 13 2025
Fredericton, NB -
GlobeXchange
Feb 11 2025
to Feb 14 2025
Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel -
BuildGreen Atlantic 2025
Apr 28 2025
to Apr 29 2025
Halifax, NS -
Building Lasting Change
Jun 18 2025
to Jun 20 2025
Vancouver, BC