Building Good

Buying carbon offsets when you take a flight or build a building can sound a little bit like cheating. Should it really be as simple as paying your way to net-zero? Do these offsets actually do anything, or are they more like sustainability cryptocurrency… just tokens that only have value because we say they do. David Oliver is CEO and founder of Greenlines technology, a company that allows people to access carbon markets. He’s someone who knows where your offsetting money goes, and how the carbon market works. 

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If you want to build a net zero project you need to predict its energy use. That’s where Matt Grace comes in. He’s an expert in creating virtual models of houses, extensions, or even entire communities to model the ways energy is used. This isn’t just a static input/output model. It changes with seasons, and as the climate changes they have to take into account rising temperatures and more erratic weather patterns. If we want to fight climate change, we need to use energy modelling to account for the already changing climate.

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If it were a country, cement would be responsible for more carbon emissions than the entire European Union. More than four times as much as Canada. Reducing the amount of carbon that concrete production creates has to be part of achieving a net zero future, so we’ve brought in Rob Cumming from Lafarge to help us figure out how. He’s head of sustainability there, so he’s full of solutions to decarbonize concrete.

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A huge chunk of a building’s emissions are baked into the fabric of the building itself. Even if its operations are net zero, the building itself might not be. This is called embodied carbon, and to truly get to net zero the industry needs to address this blind spot. That’s one of the things Luka Matutinovic works on with his company Purpose Building. They’ve created the plan that will transition all of Toronto’s city owned buildings to zero carbon. Luka’s going to help us figure out how we do it for the rest of our buildings too.

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Achieving net zero by 2050 requires us to build differently, but what about the buildings that are already up? We can’t just knock them all down, even if they are inefficient carbon factories. We retrofit them. This can be expensive and difficult though, but it's possible. Chris Benedetti knows how to make it possible, and where the financial tools exist to make it happen. We talk to Chris in this first episode of our series “Zero by Fifty”

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Canada has set an ambitious environmental goal: to have net-zero emissions as a country by 2050. One of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are our buildings, so how does the architecture and construction industry help achieve that goal? In this series Building Good speaks to industry leaders to find out how we can achieve Zero by Fifty.

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When car companies build a new car they don’t reinvent the wheel, and they don’t have engineers assembling each car individually. Pretty much everything in our lives is built out of other smaller components that are prefabricated with some degree of automation. Except for buildings. Jaimie Johnston at Bryden Wood has been working on changing that for over 25 years and he’s had a lot of pushback, but this way of working could reduce costs by a third, reduce the impact on the environment, and make for safer workplaces. It could even help solve the labour shortage while getting underemployed people into work. So why has Jaimie had to work so hard to get the industry to notice?

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Construction is rife with sexism. It’s not just catcalls on building sites, it’s tradeswomen being passed over for contracts. It’s being told you’ll never be as good as a man. It’s bad jokes… and sometimes it’s abuse. This isn’t just a question of crass language and a tough atmosphere, it’s contributing to the industry’s very real labour shortage. When construction and trades are this difficult for women then of course they are less likely to want to work in the industry, and on the occasions that they do they are far more likely to leave it. Natasha Fritz has had enough. She runs her own carpentry business and she is calling out men in construction for their sexist attitudes, because she loves working as a carpenter and she isn’t about to let them stop her.

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Construction often rubs communities up the wrong way. Architects roll in with a construction firm and big money decides what’s getting built and where. It’s no fun for the people who live there… but this isn’t how indigenous architects work. Brian Porter runs Two Row Architect, and he tells us that they work totally differently to mainstream architects. The way they build is inclusive, involving the community right from the start. Their buildings are also designed differently, leading to spaces that are both beautiful and wonderfully functional. He also tells us this is a way of building that people are hungry for… so perhaps indigenous architecture is the future of building. 

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A lot of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, depend on the weather, making their power output fluctuate. We need to store energy at times of high output. That’s where Annette Verschuren’s company NRStore comes in. They’re providing energy storage solutions (aka batteries) across Canada, and even installing microgrids in remote, fly-in locations. Annette is a true leader in sustainable power, so she knows that working with  Indigenous communities is the best way to overhaul the energy grid in Canada, and that’s what we’re talking about with her.

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