carbon-footprint / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Housing is an enormous source of carbon emissions, so it is also a place where we have tremendous room for improvement. This building guide will walk you through the steps than can help you minimize your personal emissions as much as possible, whether you are building, buying or renting. Keep in mind, this is not a sac...

Low-carbon concrete - "green" cement at last?  One of the most essential and commonly-used building materials in home construction, commercial buildings and city infrastructure is concrete, which has an extremely high carbon footprint, with cement production accounting for 7% of global carbon emission. This problem is...

EC3 - Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings EC3 Tool – The background - The interest in the environmental impact of buildings is not new by any means: scientists and building experts have been studying the life cycle analysis of buildings for several decades, particularly for certain materials such as the impact o...

  SAB: What does the CaGBC hope to achieve with the Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative? Mark Hutchinson: The CaGBC launched the zero carbon building initiative in 2016 to champion the move to lower-carbon commercial, institutional and high-rise residential buildings in support of Canada’s efforts to mitigate the effects ...

The low carbon footprint of the S1600 kit house The Ecohabitation Eco-Habitat S1600 prefab kit home was designed by PARA-SOL Architecture & Development and built by Batiment Pre-Fab Inc. The experts of Ecohabitation recently calculated the total carbon footprint of this surprisingly affordable prefab eco home, whic...

What do whales listen to?      'Pod' casts...   Talking of which, I listened to a fascinating podcast recently explaining how the carbon capture potential of whales and supporting international efforts to restore whale populations around the world is one of the simplest ways to fight climate change. The podcast was hos...

Wood, steel and concrete each have specific structural advantages, each with their own characteristics. The following is a life-cycle comparison conducted by the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute (ASMI) of the materials only, and does not include any considerations of how they each affect thermal performance, vapo...

Gabion walls are retaining walls built by stacking stone in a gabion cage or gabion basket that can serve many purposes but are most often used to create tiered or leveled ground in gardens.  They are rectangular baskets of metallic lattice filled with stones and their origin dates back to war times when they were erec...

The vision: a brighter future for Canada and North America through an evolving mid-rise construction industry Canada is the country of wood and we are all invested in the successful future of this sustainable industry. The construction of mid-rise buildings (between 6 and 10 floors) is the most important sector of the ...

Located in the bustling Griffintown neighborhood of Montreal, Canada, the mass timber Arbora mid-rise project is the largest complex of its kind in the world built with a wood-based structure. This innovative mid-rise development's time-lapse video of Arbora's frame and floor construction demonstrates how mass timber c...

Officially billed as displaying the best of 'carbon minimalism', Third Quadrant Design's Third Space Commons building combines the best of sustainable design with intelligent recycling of materials, a portland cement / concrete-free build and extensive use of innovative green building materials like hemp and hempcrete ...