A handful of start-ups, many based in California, see all that plant matter as a potential feedstock for making products routinely used in housing construction – think insulation, flooring, panelling and concrete additives.

Not only would these bio-based products greatly reduce a building’s carbon footprint; in side-by-side comparisons, building materials made from straw, hemp, flax and cellulose are more fire-resistant than their conventional counterparts – a top-of-mind concern in the Golden State following the January wildfires that razed more than 50,000 acres of land, destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed at least 29 people.

British Columbia and other parts of Canada have likewise experienced extreme weather events, from flooding to wildfires. “There’s going to be a really big push to create more houses in the near future,” says B.C.-based Elli Terwiel, owner and lead engineer at Sage Structural Engineering.

Terwiel is part of a growing movement of engineers, designers and architects that are trying to convince the construction industry that natural materials such as grain straw, corn stover (the stalks, leaves and cobs left over after the corn harvest), husks and even sewage sludge can be turned into high-performance building products. “The question is, how do we build those buildings better?” she asks. “How do we make these buildings the best that they can be for Canadians? And I do think that bio-based materials, whether just as insulation or the entire structure, there’s a place for them in the conversation.”

A recent report put out by RMI notes that many bio-based products are market-ready and are at or near cost parity today, despite most of these products not yet having reached the economies of scale of the incumbent building materials.

Mainstreaming natural building systems could, essentially, decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions by transforming the high-emitting building sector into a carbon sink.

How did we get here?

The buildings and construction sector is by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for at least 37% of global emissions. In the United States alone, new home construction emits nearly 30 million tonnes of GHG emissions each year.

Until recently, architects and engineers have focused on reducing carbon emissions generated by the maintenance and operations of a building – the GHGs created from heating, cooling and lighting, which are projected to decrease from 75% of the sector’s total emissions to 50% over the next few decades.

But this assessment of a structure’s carbon impact doesn’t account for so-called embodied carbon. Embodied carbon refers to the GHGs released during the entire life cycle of a building, starting with the extraction of the raw materials used for construction through manufacturing, transportation, installation, use and disposal. The built environment relies on concrete, steel and aluminum, which are especially difficult to decarbonize and are responsible for a considerable proportion of a building’s embodied carbon load.

Studies have shown that as much as 60% of an average building’s carbon emissions are embodied as opposed to operational.

Everything old is new again

Bio-based building products are a highly effective way to reduce embodied carbon. Roughly 50% of the weight of plants is photosynthetically sequestered carbon. Buildings that pack mostly plant matter into their structures store substantially more carbon than the amount required to process and transport the materials themselves.

Straw, which is plentiful and a natural by-product of wheat, rice, rye and oats, sequesters 60 times more carbon than it requires to grow, making it one of the most powerful carbon-storing building materials in the world. “You’re taking what would be an agricultural waste product,” Terwiel observes, “that might break down in the field, and you’re putting it into a building. You’re storing carbon in buildings.”

Using natural building materials is not an entirely new idea. Cob, a mixture of clay and straw, is a traditional building technique in the United Kingdom, where cob houses dating back several hundred years still stand. Traditional straw bale construction has been employed for more than a century in the United States. Using cellulose (finely shredded cardboard fibres and recycled paper) for building insulation dates back many centuries in both the United States and Canada.

Code work

David Arkin, a principal at Arkin Tilt Architects, a firm that specializes in ecological planning and design based in Berkeley, California, has built dozens of straw bale structures as well as a four-unit townhome project in Oregon that achieved an 85% reduction in embodied carbon through the use of natural building materials.

The challenge of such structures – and there are several – is that straw bales, like so many biomass products, must be purchased directly from the source, in this case the local farmer. “It’s a matter of scale,” Terwiel says. “You have these very small producers who are at the early adopter stage, who haven’t achieved scale to be able to go after Rona or Home Depot. You have to know where to look to find these products and the people who know how to work with them.”

Moreover, walls insulated with plant matter tend to be much thicker than typical ones. While this has its benefits – excellent thermal properties, soundproof rooms – it can also be impractical in high-density, urban settings. Which is why Anthony Dente’s firm, Verdant Structural Engineers, also based in Berkeley, has been developing a drop-in structural wall panel made from straw bales that fits conventional dimensions, complies with California’s building code and eliminates the need to visit the local farmer. Verdant plans on launching the panels in early 2026.

“I’ve given a lot of presentations to architectural firms,” Dente says. “I don’t talk about how they can buy 100 straw bales from the farmer and have a bunch of their friends stack them up in their walls. I’m talking to them about product development and efficiency and material science development and that they can start bringing these materials to their more conventional clients.”

The majority of plant-derived products, however, have yet to appear in building codes. Projects tend to be small-scale one-offs as a result, and mostly residential.

The compostable house

“Building for disassembly” refers to buildings that are designed so that every component can be removed and reused rather than tossed into a landfill where carbon is released into the atmosphere. For instance, hempcrete, derived from the hemp plant, is a superb insulating material and can also be used in place of concrete; it is lightweight, fire-resistant and entirely recyclable or reusable. “At the end of life, when you remove the finishes, you can take a building made with natural materials and it will compost itself. And that, I think, is pretty incredible,”  Terwiel says.

The RMI report cites a project that compared two residential homes, one built using standard, off-the-shelf materials, the other incorporating bio-based products in the flooring, panelling, rooftops and insulation. Equal in size, the carbon-storing model showed a 107% reduction in net emissions, tipping the building into net storage territory.

“By 2030? I’d like it if California has adopted and green-lighted the use of clay construction,” Dente says. “Clay construction is incredibly fire-resistant and high-performing – we make ovens out of clay! It’s kind of silly how hard it is to use a system that’s such a no-brainer fire solution.”

Victoria Foote is a writer and editor who specializes in clean energy and climate.

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A backlash to bans on gas infrastructure in new buildings has arrived in Canada.

Last week, Vancouver City Council voted to repeal its prohibition of “natural” gas for heating new buildings in a move climate advocates say will jeopardize the city’s climate goals.

“Council’s decision is [a] big step back for a city renowned for its leadership,” said Betsy Agar, the director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program. “To stick natural gas back into new home construction would jeopardize Vancouver’s climate goals and do nothing to reduce the costs of operating buildings over the long term.”

The repeal comes as state and municipal gas bans are going through a bit of an evolution in the United States, as they have continued to spread but have also suffered some setbacks in court. More than two dozen Republican-led state governments have barred municipalities from introducing their own prohibitions. And the first city in North America to introduce a ban – Berkeley, California – was forced to repeal its ban after a 2023 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rolled it back.

Vancouver’s move came after a change in government. City council originally implemented the ban (which did not extend to gas used for cooking) in 2020. But last week, a group of conservative councillors, who were part of Mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party elected in 2022, tried to turn the issue into an affordability one. The contingent claimed that reversing the prohibition was necessary to keep the cost of new homes down. Sim, who was called into the council meeting on Zoom while he was on vacation to cast a tie-breaking vote, said that “we all love the environment, but we need balance. We also have an affordability crisis.”

Related:

• Despite backlash, bans on gas use in new buildings keep spreading
• Is the LNG industry gaslighting the path to net-zero?
• How the natural gas supply chain is leaking methane

Climate advocates have, however, questioned whether the move will improve affordability, given that electrified buildings can be built cost-effectively.

“The housing crisis in Vancouver is driven by multiple complex factors, and delaying the construction of reliable, climate-safe buildings that are affordable to heat and cool is not a viable solution,” Agar said. “Local governments should collaborate with the provincial government to ensure new homes meet the highest standards for efficiency and electrification. This approach not only reduces emissions but also lowers energy costs for residents.”

Vancouver’s buildings are responsible for approximately 55% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Considering that, advocates say the repeal of the ban will greatly hinder the city’s pledge to reduce its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. City staff have warned council that rolling back the bylaw could set the city back “tens of thousands” of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

The new policy will likely come into effect in November and comes at a time when other cities in B.C., such as Victoria, have adopted the top tier of a stringent provincial building code that will limit the greenhouse gas emissions of new buildings and effectively phase out most fossil-fuel use in them.

“By reverting to natural gas, [Vancouver] risks locking itself into a high-carbon infrastructure at a time when urgent climate action is needed,” Agar said.

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The need to address these blockages is critical, the clean energy think tank writes [pdf] in a new report, noting that Canada’s building sector contributes 13% of the country’s total emissions. And with an estimated C$3.1 billion in extreme weather event losses accrued in 2023 alone, Canada also needs to rapidly build resilience.

“Retrofitting existing buildings is the only climate action that can both drive down emissions and protect Canadians from weather events that are increasing in severity and frequency as our climate changes,” Pembina says.

But it will be a long road ahead to decarbonizing enough buildings to meet Canada’s 2050 net zero emission goals: “We will need to retrofit 4% to 6% of our building stock, or roughly 600,000 homes, each year,” writes Pembina analyst Raidin Blue in a blog post.

And only deep retrofits going beyond simple renovations—“holistic energy efficiency upgrades to homes that improve occupant health and make housing more affordable by lowering bills that are achieved through the use of low-carbon materials, new technologies (like heat pumps), and the use of smart electricity grids”—will serve both to lower emissions, and protect Canadians from harm.

To get the job done, Canada’s deep retrofit supply chain will need to be substantially improved, Pembina notes. After surveying some 80 people employed along that supply chain—from designers, to contractors, to those who monitor building operations post-retrofit—Pembina cites the lack of market certainty, resulting from a lax regulatory environment, as the weakest link in the retrofit chain.

That means “implementing regulations that require deep building decarbonization” and help reassure prospective investors, will be job one.

“Setting energy performance standards for new buildings” and introducing “high-efficiency equipment standards to require replacement heating equipment be at least 100% efficient,” are two of the regulatory changes recommended by sector workers.

“Such regulations can take time but are coming in some jurisdictions,” Pembina adds, citing Ottawa’s efforts to craft its Alterations to Existing Buildings code, now delayed to 2030. British Columbia’s Highest Efficiency Equipment Standards for Space and Water Heating is also slated for that year.

Canadian policy-makers also need to address the persistent problem of low demand, which owes significantly to consumer ignorance about deep retrofit processes. “Clarifying the benefits of deep retrofits, helping to build trust in industry, and helping reduce complexity” will help solve this problem, says Pembina.

Canada also needs more grants and incentives to mitigate “the high cost of innovative, low-carbon technologies used in deep retrofits.” Those currently working in the residential deep retrofit sector identify a shortage of skilled labour as the third major pinch point.

“Deep retrofits require unique skill sets,” notes Pembina. “As such, the federal government should commit C$1.5 billion over five years for skill development, capacity building, and recruitment.”

That commitment should prioritize inclusivity and equity, recognizing that “deep retrofits present an opportunity for communities throughout the country.”

Local job creation and training “will help to build inclusive and equitable workplaces that attract workers from equity-seeking groups—a win-win-win for people in Canada, industry, and policymakers alike,” Pembina says.

The article first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original story here. 

The post How Canada can climate-proof more than half a million homes appeared first on Corporate Knights.

There are plenty of reasons for this welcome shift. Indeed, building materials and construction account for 11% of all global emissions. The accumulating evidence suggests that our pre-occupation with operational carbon and energy efficiency (i.e., gas for heating and cooling, high-efficiency furnaces, etc.) may be missing the mark. According to the Canada Green Building Council embodied carbon accounts for a whopping 90% of a new building’s emissions over a three-decade span.  

Research carried out at the University of Toronto by a group led by architect Kelly Doran has shown that underground parking garages and concrete foundations are among the major culprits, accounting in some cases for 80% of the carbon expended on a given project over its lifetime.  

“That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings,” says Shayna Stott, a senior City of Toronto planner.  

Toronto City Council earlier this month took a significant step towards reducing embodied carbon in new buildings with a new policy that offers cash incentives – from $2,400 to almost $5,300 per apartment, depending on size – for builders who voluntarily limit the embodied carbon in their projects to a series of caps established for various categories of structures. The move, which will be embedded in Version 4 of Toronto Green Standard, comes less than a year after Council voted to eliminate parking minimums for new condos and rental buildings – a decision that will result in smaller garages and less concrete consumption.  

“We were all focused for a long time on the operational energy,” says Jane Welsh, Toronto’s environmental policy project manager. “Understanding the materials is very important.”  

The new embodied carbon caps – 250 kgCO2e/m2 and 350 kgCO2e/m2 – reflect testing done by the U of T team, which benchmarked about 550 buildings of various sizes and uses and estimated the life cycle carbon for each. The caps are set at approximately the median for embodied carbon, meaning they’re sufficiently aggressive to generate savings but not out of reach of current approaches. 

A more intensive set of caps is applied to all city projects, as well as the thousands of new rental units planned for city-owned land parcels around Toronto. Like B.C.’s Step Code, the Toronto Green Standard is revised regularly, with each so-called tier becoming progressively more stringent; Tier 1 is mandatory. “We will start working later this fall and into the spring [on Version 5],” says Welsh. “We’ll be looking at whether we can move [the embodied carbon caps] into Tier 1, which would be required.” 

That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings.

 

– Shayna Stott, City of Toronto planner

 

Incentivized caps, of course, are only half the picture. The other piece of this puzzle is finding techniques for building that uses less carbon. One obvious candidate, now used increasingly frequently, is tall timber. Modular construction – with building elements, including units themselves – pre-made in a factory and then shipped for assembly to the building site – is another.  

But experts such as Ted Kesik, a U of T engineering professor and an authority on building codes, points out that many projects today are over-built and simply consume a redundant amount of reinforced concrete, largely because it’s inexpensive. He says eight-inch shear walls, which are building code compliant, have gradually expanded to 10 or 12 inches, while sloppy architecture results in the use of massive concrete-and-steel transfer beams.  

Besides dialing back on unnecessary concrete, developers can alter the embodied carbon of their projects by using different forms of cladding, which are commercially available, and low-carbon insulation. “We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe,” says Kesik. But, to get there, he adds, “we’ll have to see a bit of a cultural change.”   

Beyond such moves, developers and their contractors can also use a range of pre-fabricated concrete panels that have voids, which mean they weigh less, or source so-called green concrete, which is made with recycled ingredients, such as waste fly ash from steel plants. 

Kesik adds that the city’s new embodied carbon caps are “very generous” and points out that it’s entirely possible to achieve levels under 200 kgCO2e/m2 using mass timber. 

We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe.

 

– Ted Kesik, U of T engineering professor

Toronto’s move puts it in a growing class of cities, regions and governments that have or are making similar efforts to regulate and push down embodied carbon, among them Vancouver and California. Canada’s federal government has indicated it will require a 30% reduction of embodied carbon in the structural materials of new public buildings as of 2025, according to policy research conducted last year for the Ontario government by U of T, The Atmospheric Fund, the City of Toronto and Mantle Developments. 

New York City, in turn, has employed caps in a more hard-nosed way, imposing a firm emissions cap on all buildings over 25,000 sq.-ft., a collection of some 50,000 structures. The regulation, passed in 2019 and known as Local Law 97, doesn’t bother with carrots: property owners that don’t comply get fined. 

While efforts to drive down building-related emissions also depend heavily on planning factors, such as intensification, and transportation policies that provide alternatives to private vehicles, the important detail in the new embodied carbon policy is the embodied carbon assessments developers will have to undertake to represent a complete accounting. It’s no longer just a case of measuring whether a building is running its HVAC efficiently or if it checks off boxes on a LEED certification program. 

The question now is whether the building industry will take up the challenge. Welsh and Stott say they’re seeing some interest and a more diverse set of builders looking to find out about whether they can take advantage of the incentives. Those signals, says Stott, are “indicative of the commitments to address climate change across the industry, as well as how the program supports making those decisions to get there.” 

The post Toronto is the latest city to crackdown on carbon-heavy building materials appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Depending on how you play with the statistics, buildings contribute between a quarter and half of the global greenhouse gas emissions threatening the survival of our species. And most of those emissions come from the world’s biggest cities. In New York City, heating, cooling, cooking, water heating and clothes drying in buildings create about 70% of atmospheric carbon and methane.

We’re beginning to do better with the electrification of vehicles and the ramping up of renewable energy. Adoption of these has already passed the tipping point. Greening these sectors together with solving our buildings predicament would put us on a path to ending about 75% of global emissions.

Unprecedented heat, fires, floods and storms are forcing politicians to declare a climate emergency, and more are turning to the building sector for solutions. U.S. President Joe Biden’s pivotal Inflation Reduction Act is pouring billions into tax incentives for building retrofits. Officials all over North America are announcing bans on natural gas hookups in new buildings. In place of gas-burning furnaces, politicians are talking up electric heat pumps.

In the midst of it all, Benedict and her team are in the spotlight, having partnered with New York State, the city and RiseBoro Community Partnership over many years to refine climate solutions, most recently installing heat pumps and other green technology in nine multi-family buildings in Brooklyn. “Suddenly, I’ve been getting a lot more calls about affordable retrofits, creating lower-carbon, healthy spaces,” Benedict says. “This RiseBoro group alone has another 100 buildings. We’re starting on some more projects of theirs right after these nine, plus a 13-storey seniors’ tower.”

Like Benedict, architects, engineers and builders everywhere are now being asked to decarbonize larger buildings than ever before, with well-proven green technology that much of the public assumes is new. Green building professionals have survived decades-long struggles against industry acceptance, regulatory frameworks, tight budgets, supply chains and, above all, fear of change.

Now that public support for the energy transition is growing, can we take emissions from all buildings to near zero? Can we ramp it up fast, and scale it up large? Absolutely yes, say these experts. Corporate Knights reached out to the teams working on more than half a dozen of the most exciting green architectural achievements in North America to learn more about how they’re doing just that.

There may not be enough of them, but many buildings are already greener than we think, and sustainable features are already operating at large scale. Read on to find out just how large and how today’s green building heroes are trying to save our planet.

Affordable housing retrofits in Brooklyn

The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, and on that mucky spring morning, a young Benedict donned her rubber boots and went out into the woodlands and parks of Connecticut with a community team to pick up litter. She was shocked to discover that, by summer’s end, people had thoughtlessly spread trash in the exact same places.

Now an architect, Benedict is still trying to clean up the neighbourhood. But she’s using Casa Pasiva, a 146-unit project in Bushwick, as a model for healthy, cost-effective, deep energy retrofits to occupied buildings that are mostly affordable rental units. Her team is refining an innovative methodology to reach Passive House certification from Phius (Passive House Institute U.S.). “With retrofits you become inventive,” says Benedict. “We were able to get a zoning change approved so we could put eight inches of insulation on the outside of buildings. We all need to take action and take responsibility for climate change.”

The insulation, along with new windows, heat pumps, induction cooktops and energy recovery systems, will reduce energy usage by 60% to 80%, significantly lowering operational expenses and emissions. Tenants usually grumble about having to move out for a couple of weeks during renovation, but, Benedict says, “when they hear they will be able to control their air conditioning, they’re more motivated.”

It’s relatively easy to erect a few new low-carbon single-family homes or multi-unit structures. Benedict has worked on a number of them. But buildings last for up to 100 years and are typically replaced at a rate of about 3% annually. Most of New York City’s fossil-fuel-heated edifices will still be standing in 2040. Benedict is one of the few people anywhere successfully tackling this massive retrofit challenge – and the impacts are longer-lasting than picking up litter.

Extreme-weather-resilient subdivisions in Florida and Texas

In 2022, Hurricane Ian hit Florida with a huge storm surge and 150-mile-per-hour winds. It killed more than 100 people and left billions of dollars in damages, mostly around Fort Myers. It bashed the area for nine hours, but a town called Babcock Ranch almost completely withstood the pounding. Built among forest trails, lakes and wetlands by former NFL player Syd Kitson, the town of 2,000 homes features extensive ecosystem-based flood and wind defences, plus solar panels, home batteries and electric vehicle chargers.

“When I was a child, my father and I witnessed the incredible power of a hurricane slamming the New Jersey coast,” Kitson says. “The outdoors are in my soul. I wanted to create a place that respected nature and could stand up to hurricanes.”

Babcock civil engineer Amy Wicks agrees. “Nature was always smarter than us. It has survived for thousands of years. We need to work with it, not against it.”

Some of the country’s largest builders are partners at Babcock Ranch, as well as at Whisper Valley, one of several expansive sustainable subdivisions in the Austin area in Texas. The latter will soon reach 3,000 low-energy homes, all cooled and heated with geothermal. The low-carbon system uses artificial intelligence to save about 60% on energy through networking, sharing and optimization.

Whisper Valley is as resilient as Babcock Ranch. The subdivision emerged unscathed from the deadly Texas cold snap of 2021, which killed more than 200 people with lower-quality homes and heating equipment not designed for freezing temperatures.

Geothermal for Toronto condos

For 13 years, Tim Weber tried to sell geothermal cooling and heating systems to Ontario condo developers with little success. Why add to capital budgets with scary technology? Weber hit on an idea: what if, like the gas companies, he became a utility?

He found a deep-pocketed investment partner in Quebec, created an entity to handle condo owner billing and maintenance, then in 2015 he went back to developers with the message that he could now own and maintain those systems, reducing both their capital budgets and technology problems. They started listening. There are now dozens of increasingly large condo projects in Ontario with geothermal fields under them.

One of Weber’s early partners was Stanley Reitsma, who as a teenager planted hundreds of trees on his family farm in Ontario and later studied geology and earth sciences. Reitsma went to work in the Alberta oil sands, drilling deep holes in the ground. “But I was always an environmentalist,” he says. In 2004, he headed back east and started GeoSource Energy.

Today it’s one of the most successful geothermal drillers in North America, bringing geothermal heating and cooling to condos, affordable multi-family homes, and university and government facilities on both sides of the border. The projects are big and the company will soon scale larger, too. Always a little ahead of the curve, Reitsma is now working with some international construction conglomerates interested in creating models that can respond to the current dramatic increase in green construction.

Passive and massive in Boston

Thanks to double pane Sotawall Thermo-3 windows, a howling wind outside was barely audible on the 32nd floor of Boston’s Winthrop Center in January while Brad Mahoney talked about architectural details and energy loss: “This is not just a blip. This is the way that projects will be built.”

Millennium Partners, the developer behind the Winthrop Center, claims that at 53 storeys, the massive 1.8-million-square-foot residential, office and retail complex is “the world’s largest Passive House office building.” More than half of it, the 812,000-square-foot office section, is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum, WELL Gold, and Passive House certified by PHI. The entire building will emit about 150% less carbon than a typical Class A (modern high-rise) structure and 60% less than LEED Platinum. (LEED was one of the earliest building energy certifications. Passive House is more rigorous, and results-focused. WELL emphasizes health and wellness by managing air quality, water, light and fitness enhancement.)

Before 2016, Millennium was not focused on sustainability. But Mahoney had always been environmentally conscious, having acquired his LEED AP (for “accredited professional”) designation about 20 years ago. He persuaded Millennium’s president that green buildings were the way forward. The two began building a digital library on all things related to low-carbon construction. They partnered with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and visited the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. They hired New York’s Handel Architects and Steven Winter Associates for the Winthrop Center request for proposal. They won the contract.

Last year, the project won a 2022 Passive House Trailblazer award from the U.S. Passive House Network, and tenants start moving into the tower in early 2023. “This is the space to be in, because there is now so much momentum,” says Mahoney. “We’re never going back to the old way.”

Harlem: ‘Sendero verde’ means ‘green path’

In October 2019, at a low-key technical event at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, the keynote presentation was given by building engineer Lois Arena from Steven Winter Associates and architect Deborah Moelis from Handel Architects. The presentation’s content reverberated across the North American construction world.

The duo was instantly famous, revealing that they had designed the 709-unit Sendero Verde project in New York City within the confines of an affordable housing budget. They reported that their companies had also collaborated on The House, a 26-storey modular Passive House–certified student residence for Cornell University’s tech school on NYC’s Roosevelt Island, and were working on the 53-storey Winthrop Center in Boston. Oh, and by the way, the Passive House–certified residence for U of T Scarborough coming in 2023 is theirs too.

Sendero Verde is perhaps the big daddy of them all. The two-building housing complex in Harlem has double pane windows, a well-sealed envelope at least five times tighter and better insulated than typical buildings, and is heated and cooled by a commercial-scale heat pump system.

Arena and Moelis’s presentation was a shock for many, because it helped answer some of the questions that a significant portion of the construction industry and the rest of the world is only now beginning to ask: Are green buildings a theory, a bunch of pilot projects, or a real thing? Can they be built quickly? Can we afford to build them?

“We’ve got the data now, and all our projects are already at least 50% lower emissions,” says Dylan Martello, Passive House consultant on Sendero Verde. “With New York, Massachusetts and many other governments making changes, I’m optimistic that things are going in the right direction, but I’m not sure if it’s fast enough. I worry because I want to have kids one day.”

Today at building conferences around the globe, the question being asked by Martello and a growing legion of allies is no longer “Can we afford to build green buildings?” It’s “With our planet in crisis, can we afford not to?”

BF Nagy is the author of The Clean Energy Age and numerous magazine features. He also produces videos on climate solutions.

The post How today’s green building heroes are scaling up to save our planet appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, he set in motion a seeming avalanche of public and private investment in climate solutions, including those focused on the building sector, which accounts for about 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The bill will allocate US$391 billion toward climate solutions, including new tax credits for residential energy retrofits, energy efficiency rebates and a range of related measures, such as new energy efficiency standards for air conditioners and other HVAC equipment. There’s also funding for retrofits, updated building energy codes, and deductions for commercial buildings that reduce their energy consumption.  

The Inflation Reduction Act’s impact extends across the 49th parallel, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has sought to make sure that the unprecedented public funding in the U.S. doesn’t suck green investment out of Canada, including investment that will decarbonize buildings.  

Herewith, a sampling of what 2023 may have to offer in the world of green buildings. 

Green ‘proptech’

Private equity has increasingly sought out “proptech” ventures, and especially green proptech – technologies designed to improve the environmental performance of buildings. A/O PropTech, a venture capital firm specializing in this space, reported recently that this sector has clocked an 84% annual growth rate over the past five years, with US$4.5 billion allocated globally, much of it landing in European cities. A/O PropTech itself has a stake in 22 firms, including property-management software platforms, electrical-appliance control systems and various planning analytics tools.  

According to a new market analysis entitled The Future of Building in a Low Carbon World, the company says it sees investment opportunities in the coming years in a range of construction-related verticals, such as green procurement software, architectural software that enables low-carbon design approaches, and emerging building materials. In particular, A/O predicts further innovation in the design of modular housing, citing the US$1.6 billion invested in the prefab (aka modular construction) industry in 2022, which was two-and-a-half-times more than the previous year.  

The modular construction sector – which relies on factory-built components and assembly to drive up productivity and quality control – has generated a lot of attention recently as pressure to accelerate the development of affordable housing builds due to skyrocketing real estate prices and rents in many cities. Modular construction is also associated with cleaner construction as it can be done faster, and with reduced waste and emissions.  

Carbon disclosure makes for green buildings

The push in recent years to build more energy efficient buildings can inadvertently boost the use  of carbon-intensive construction materials, like certain types of insulation. Similarly, urban intensification, which reduces transportation-related carbon, also tends to drive up the use of carbon-intensive materials, like concrete, steel and glass.  

Efforts to push developers to assess and disclose the embodied carbon in their projects, and then report on the energy performance of their buildings, have gained some traction in recent years, for example with New York City’s Local Law 97, which mandates asset managers to begin filing assessments of energy consumption by 2025. The Toronto Green Standard, updated in May 2022, now requires developers to measure and disclose embodied carbon if they want to qualify for certain rebates for green building projects. And Canada’s federal government in late 2022 established an embodied carbon standard for its own construction projects. 

Interestingly, large asset managers are the ones pushing for more disclosure and better reporting. In an October 2022 report entitled Full Disclosure, the Canada Green Building Council, representing firms with $110 billion in assets, called on governments to establish building-energy disclosure guidelines and mandate data sharing as a prerequisite for approvals. “Data transparency and benchmarking can help guide energy and emissions reductions, and more broadly, can aid in the development of effective policies and programs,” the report said. All the members have vowed to make their own data – good, bad or ugly – public.  

Circular construction

Data and disclosure aren’t the sole drivers. As cities move to intensify, there’s growing interest in recycling construction debris from older buildings as a means of reducing construction-related emissions. But as The New York Times reported in a widely read October 2022 feature, circular-economy-minded Dutch architects and builders increasingly look to “urban mining” as a means of sourcing cast-off materials – like discarded clothing refashioned into insulation – for new projects.  

Amsterdam has gone one step further, by monitoring its circular economy performance and making the results public. The city’s first pass was self-critical. “Despite many initiatives, the bulk of Amsterdam’s economy is still based on intensive primary material consumption.” As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  

Renewables paired with storage

The growth of solar is on a steep upward trajectory, driven by falling prices, expanding incentives and, in some jurisdictions, including Tokyo and parts of the EU, mandates on new construction. But with the proliferation of electric vehicles and thus demand for renewable electricity, combining solar panels with utility-scale storage is poised to see accelerated growth in the next several years. Indeed, the expanded role of solar and storage will enable more homes and commercial buildings to transition to electric heat.  

The massive scaling up of renewables is a necessary step in the energy transition but not sufficient, given issues with intermittent supply. Local grids, feeling the pinch from increased electricity demand, need new deployments of both local renewables and storage systems that can store and then provide off-peak power. “By 2025, over 29% of all new behind-the-meter solar systems will be paired with storage, compared to under 11% in 2021,” according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. “The utility-scale market is also recognizing the benefits of pairing solar with storage, with over 45 [gigawatts] of commissioned or announced projects paired with storage, representing over 50 [gigawatt hours] of storage capacity.” 

Storage initiatives come in many flavours – battery farms, pumped hydro (surplus power used to pump water into reservoirs), or the production of green hydrogen for fuel cells with industrial–scale electrolyzers. In its 2022 budget, Canada’s federal government introduced a 30% tax credit for companies developing battery storage and clean hydrogen solutions. The Biden administration in 2021 pumped US$9.5 billion into clean hydrogen development, with more expected under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, clean hydrogen for home energy is not yet a slam dunk. A much-hyped “world-first” project in Scotland, to use green hydrogen to replace natural gas, has succumbed to delays and technical problems.  

Investor interest in offshore wind will also drive investment in storage and green hydrogen production. According to a 2022 year-end review by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the amount of offshore capacity in the development pipeline grew 13%, with more than 40,000 megawatts planned or under construction. The demand will be stoked by tax credits and grants enabled by the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union and the United Kingdom have 100 gigawatts of offshore planned by 2030 – enough to power 75 million homes. Despite its extensive shoreline, Canada lags behind the U.S., with 5 GW of offshore wind to be built off the coast of Nova Scotia by 2030.  

The surge of investment that will be unleashed this year by the Inflation Reduction Act comes at a fortuitous moment, as it dovetails with critical refinements in renewable energy systems, green building technology and consumer/developer attitudes about why decarbonizing the built environment is a critical piece of the fight to reverse the climate crisis. Perhaps 2023 will be the year when all the pieces begin to fit together.  

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“We can’t keep trying to do retrofits in the way we were doing them in the 1980s and 1990s and expect to bend this curve,” said Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights, at part four of our Earth Index event series tracking the “say–do” gap between Canada’s climate action and targets. Torrie estimates we will need to spend between $14 and $48 billion per year to achieve net-zero buildings by 2035, roughly on par with the $20 to $40 billion spent in Canada each year on routine maintenance and repairs. 

“This cannot be our parents’ retrofit program,” Torrie said.

By 2030, existing Canadian homes will be responsible for 90% of residential emissions, so it won’t be enough to just ban gas hookups in new developments. Decarbonizing this sector will require an unprecedented scale of fuel switching to heat pumps and deep retrofit programs for existing buildings, he added. 

Our general mindset has to change, panellists said. We have to stop thinking that the building industry’s emissions will gradually decline and realize that they must descend down a number of steep steps, said Akua Schatz, vice-president of market engagement and advocacy at the Canada Green Building Council. This will mean taking on an aggressive schedule of deep retrofits rather than depending on constant incremental ones. “You don’t have many chances. So every step matters,” Schatz said. 

We also need to stop thinking of housing affordability and climate compatibility as opposing goals, said Steve Mennill, chief climate officer for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, as deep retrofit programs will be central to bringing down the energy costs of the more than 2.8 million households in Canada that spend a disproportionate amount on energy, and sometimes have to choose between heating their homes and eating. 

This has been particularly apparent in Heiltsuk First Nation in British Columbia, where leaders say an initiative to install heat pumps in homes has reduced residents’ heating costs and brought more energy sovereignty to the community. “It costs less to save a kilowatt than to generate one,” Leona Humchitt, a member of the Heiltsuk Tribal Council, told the panel. The community has installed heat pumps in more than 150 homes and hopes to complete retrofits in all 420 of its residential buildings. 

Climate compatibility

Mennill pointed out that we need different solutions for retrofitting private rental housing, community housing and private homes. He said private rental housing needs greater access to capital, the community housing sector needs greater support through subsidy programs, and we need to look at ways to make these changes more affordable for homeowners. “Right now, your cost of capital as a homeowner, if you’re going to do a retrofit to your house, is basically the same [as] if you’re purchasing a new or existing non-climate-compatible house.” 

Either way, when it comes to retrofitting multi-unit buildings, Mennil says both mitigation and adaptation need to be top of mind. “It’s not sufficient to consider just one or the other,” he told the panel. Reducing a building’s emissions needs to be done in lockstep with preparing it for the rising threat of floods and storms. 

Barriers abound

One of the biggest and most obvious barriers to building owners taking on deep retrofits is asking them to pay for them out of pocket. “This needs to be a public service,” said Julia Langer, CEO of the Atmospheric Fund. Her organization is pushing for a fund to support these kinds of projects. 

Building owners also simply don’t have the technical and financial expertise to carry out deep retrofit projects, which have lots of moving pieces. In an effort to help them navigate this process, the Atmospheric Fund has launched what it calls retrofit accelerators. “If you want to go deep in terms of retrofits, we need to ‘multi-solve.’ We can’t just look at the carbon,” Langer said. “We’ve got to look at social aspects, resilience, [and] financial aspects all together.” 

In commercial real estate, Jamie Gray-Donald, senior vice-president of sustainability at QuadReal Property Group, said it will take more policy certainty from governments and much better data-gathering to rapidly decarbonize the sector. Gray-Donald said that the real estate sector is 20 years behind others when it comes to the type of data it has but that for every dollar invested in energy and carbon data, it’s possible to see a three- or fourfold return. “Once you have really granular stuff, amazing solutions open up,” he said.

Building innovation

While retrofitting existing buildings will make up the largest chunk of decarbonizing the real estate sector, research is underway to make constructing new developments carbon neutral. A Toronto-based start-up called Promise Robotics is working to use robotics and artificial intelligence to reduce the carbon footprint of building new homes. 

And last year, Vancouver-based Nexii Building Solutions became Canada’s fastest company to reach “unicorn status” (when a start-up gains a value of $1 billion.) The company manufactures building panels made with a proprietary material called Nexiite, which it claims will reduce the building process’s carbon emissions by a third and cut energy demand to heat homes by 55%. 

From an energy-source standpoint, Enwave has been working to install what’s called GeoExchange technology in thousands of new homes in North America. This system harnesses thermal energy from the ground to heat homes during the winter and cools air during the summer. 

Catherine Thorn, a senior director of community energy planning at Enwave, noted another major hurdle to decarbonizing Canada’s buildings: builders are still being compensated with rebates for installing carbon-intensive natural gas infrastructure. Thorn said that if the developer isn’t planning to use natural gas, they’ll still be asked to install gas infrastructure and won’t receive any rebate if it isn’t used. “It’s a very big mismatch in incentive in what we’re trying to achieve,” she said. 

Regulate and subsidize it

Governments across the world have varying records on their efforts to decarbonize buildings. The City of New York has upped its ambition on cutting building emissions, with a piece of legislation called Local Law 97. This bill will require most buildings with more than 25,000 square feet to meet standards on both energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions by 2024, and stricter limits will be enacted in 2030. Langer said Toronto is exploring the idea. 

On the national level, some G7 countries have introduced robust retrofit subsidy programs. In 2020, the Italian government introduced a 110% subsidy for green retrofits that in turn boosted the country’s gross domestic product by 0.7% last year and created 153,000 jobs. 

Canada, in contrast, has been a laggard in this area. The federal government’s modest retrofit program for homeowners that launched in May – the Canada Greener Homes Grant – has struggled to keep up with demand, having received more than 180,000 applications, according to The Globe and Mail. The program reimburses homeowners for up to $5,000 in retrofits and has processed payment to only 1,227 applicants as of January 18. 

We can’t keep trying to do retrofits in the way we were doing them in the 1980s and 1990s and expect to bend this curve.

-Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights

In December, the Prime Minister’s Office released mandate letters to cabinet ministers that signalled that retrofitting buildings would be part of the government’s plans to cut emissions, following similar commitments made during the recent election campaign. 

Schatz said some of the key government commitments to watch in this area will be making the electricity system net-zero by 2035; implementing a national zero-emissions building strategy; creating a net-zero building code by 2024; and launching a National Infrastructure Assessment (an evolving document that will guide Canada’s infrastructure) that includes buildings. 

The clock is ticking on the federal government’s pledge to axe emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Since there are just over 400 weeks until that deadline, achieving this goal will involve taking a wrecking ball to Canada’s building emissions, and doing it swiftly. 

“We’ve got to start behaving like this is the emergency we’ve been saying it is,” said Torrie. “We’re out of time.”

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To achieve this objective, engineered versions of age-old building technologies, like wood, straw or bamboo, are critical. These bio-based building materials generally demand less energy in manufacturing and have the ability to capture and store carbon through photosynthesis.

This is why experts in green building policy, climate science and architecture increasingly tout the benefits of transforming buildings from a giant source of carbon into a large carbon sink.

As scholars of business sustainability and bio-products markets, we closely observe the trends in green building and construction industries, and the reactions these provoke in sectors of the economy looking to cut emissions. With corporate announcements on the rise that publicize natural materials like wood as “the new concrete” in company offices and warehouses, we believe it’s time to take a closer look at the opportunities and limitations of making building materials part of a company’s net-zero carbon pledges.

The rise of net-zero carbon offices

The past two decades have seen the use of green buildings as an explicit tool to reduce the carbon footprint of companies. It is now commonplace for business offices to feature the latest in engineering and building operations, from energy efficiency and on-site heating and cooling, to waste reduction and recycling.

Bloomberg’s European headquarters, for instance, has earned the title of the world’s most sustainable office building for combining all these measures. From a company perspective, going beyond operational efficiency, to also focus on building materials, is a logical step.

Walmart offers one prominent example of the use of bio-based building materials. The retail giant is set to finish its new home office in Bentonville, Ark., by 2025. It is the largest corporate campus project in the U.S. that uses mass timber, a group of large engineered structural wooden panels that have gained market acceptance following changes in building codes, for the construction of multi-storey and tall wood buildings.

Structurlam, a Canadian company that delivers mass timber, opened a fully automated facility in Walmart’s home state where it procures lumber from forests in the region to complete the project. Similarly, Google will soon finish its first mass timber office complex.

Microsoft already opened a building on its Silicon Valley campus that uses over 2,100 tonnes of cross-laminated timber (CLT), a wood panel system that is projected to reach a global market size of more than $3 billion within the next five years.

Some European firms like the German retail chain Alnatura are using prefabricated loam in their headquarters, and automaker BMW is about to open an electric vehicle showroom in California that has flooring made from hemp wood.

Green construction meets prefab

What unites these technologies is a potential to combine climate benefits with the shift towards off-site construction and prefabrication, where the planning, design, manufacturing and partial assembly of building elements occurs at a location other than the final building site.

Many of the manufacturers that offer buildings made from bio-based materials are, in fact, a new class of technology start-ups that are backed by large investors.

Prefabrication helps optimize material use and model adaptive structures that can be deconstructed, modified and reassembled, thereby reducing the need for virgin resources.

This provides companies with immense flexibility in planning for the long-term use of their office buildings, sales stores, warehouses and factories, without having to think about demolishing a structure.

Limitations of bio-based building material

Bio-based building materials have their limitations. Harnessing their environmental potential requires that they are sourced from sustainable supply chains. From a climate perspective, building wooden office towers with timber can be counterproductive if large amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted in the logging, transport and manufacture of wood products.

A company may also ask whether new buildings are needed in the first place. After all, the lowest carbon footprint is that of a building that is never constructed.

Companies may consider using bio-based building materials in retrofitting and remodelling existing offices or factories instead of building new ones. Serial retrofit initiatives, of the kind spearheaded by governments in Europe and suggested for Canada, already funnel capital into the scale-up of industries for prefabricated building technologies, like facades made from wood and recycled materials.

Ultimately, as with all corporate environmental strategies, simply introducing bio-based products and materials to the company, be it in office buildings or elsewhere, without having resources in place to monitor their environmental efficacy (for example, in procurement, installation and use) can backfire.

The future of bio-based building materials

Building materials can play a key role, when considered as a part of a broader strategy in companies’ efforts to reach net-zero emissions. Over 450 firms around the world have already pledged to finance the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The issue of materials in construction is gaining attention at the global scale as well. With more than 130 events focused on the built environment at the COP26 summit in November, buildings received more attention than ever.

That being said, bio-based products and materials will require even more attention going forward. A likely bottleneck in assessing when and how to use bio-based building materials, will be just how quickly industries normalize the use of life cycle costing tools, such as whole life carbon accounting.

Progress on the adoption of these tools has been slow, but the recent signing of whole life carbon requirements by 44 large companies offers hope that the time for net-zero carbon buildings may indeed be ripe.

Meike Siegner is a post-doctoral research fellow at the department of mechanical and industrial engineering at Ryerson University.

Cody Searcy is a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, as well as vice-provost and dean of graduate studies at Ryerson University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Since 2009, I’ve worked with Ethical Markets Media to publish the annual Green Transition Scoreboard. Our latest report details more than $10 trillion of private investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, green construction, corporate green R&D and life systems over the last ten years.

The full report, titled Transitioning to Science-Based Investing, contains many provocative thoughts from renowned futurist Hazel Henderson. Henderson reveals how science-denial is a huge source of financial risk in today’s markets, referencing the Network for Greening the Financial System’s Reporting for a Secure Climate that shows $1 trillion to $4 trillion in potential liabilities in the energy sector alone.

She says financial systems and global markets are still operating on “anthropocentric textbook formulas, erroneous views of ‘human nature’ and resulting obsolete models of risk, focusing on short-term monetary rewards. Since price data is always historic, they are often backing into the future looking through rear-view mirrors.”

It’s not all doom and gloom. Henderson takes her title of Futurist to heart, showcasing some truly inspiring developments in sectors like energy, water, pollution cleanup, and – my current favourite – sustainable agriculture. With so much buzz around Beyond Meat’s successful initial public offering (IPO), there’s lots of investor appetite for sustainable foods. We’re keeping our eye on everything from halophytes – plants that grow in seawater – to insects as a sustainable source of protein.

Here’s a quick breakdown of private investments to date since 2009:

Renewable energy – Now at $4.419 trillion. Growing strongly, as fossil fuels become “stranded assets” and with the rise of electrification in transport.

Energy efficiency – Grew to $2.172 trillion, which reduces company costs and is the driver of the circular economy where many companies now compete to upcycle all kinds of previously ignored waste streams, for example, TerraCycle and ECOR. Efficiently using all resources creates widespread ripple effects (jobs creation, etc.) and will be central as electrification and better storage advance in transport and other sectors.

Life systems –Includes investments in water, land, remediation, waste and recycling, green infrastructure, which topped $1.9 trillion. The entire current global food system is being disrupted by a host of external forces. We forecast the continued acceleration of the current shifts in our global climate along with the further expansion of alternative plant-based foods and beverages. Also, the lowest hanging, viable shift will be toward salt-loving halophyte foods which can thrive on the planet’s 40% of degraded, desert land and 97% saltwater.

Green construction – This sector advanced strongly to $1.265 trillion, ranging from “low-tech” passive solar buildings to “high-tech” and new construction methods that use biomimicry, including copying the design principles that termites use to keep their mounds cool.

Corporate green R&D – Grew strongly to $581 billion. This sector is also heavily weighted in favor of automotive industries and their shift to electric vehicles, batteries, energy generation, conservation and distribution. Commitments are mostly from car companies’ R & D in electric vehicles and batteries.

Having tracked investments in green sectors for 10 years, I’m encouraged by the speed and scale of the growth that I’m seeing. For a long time, the knock on green sectors was that they weren’t economically competitive without subsidies. Now they’re competing despite a political shift toward populism that is not exactly friendly to the environment. Climate action-curbing politicians like Donald Trump and Doug Ford won’t stop the growth of the green economy, they can only slow it down. The climate crisis is quickly rising among voter priorities, and the political pendulum will swing back at some point, when these sectors will grow even faster.

There’s still much work to be done if we are to avert the worst-case climate scenarios and build a sustainable economy. Ten trillion is a major milestone, but it’s still just the beginning. We forecast continued acceleration of the current shifts in our global economy, and I’m excited to watch the numbers keep growing.

Tim Nash’s Sustainable Stock Showdown will return next week.

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