sustainable-living / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Let's be inspired, every day According to a recent survey sponsored by Google of more than 3,000 Americans by using a type of AI called natural language processing, which is where they cluster and analyze thousands of opinions by theme to identify how people felt about environmental issues.  The keyword for how we feel...

The Living Building challenge is one of the toughest green building certifications to complete, and has yet to be achieved in Canada. The Endeavour Centre, a not-for-profit trade school in Peterborough Ontario, is setting out to change that when they begin construction this spring on a 2,000 square foot three bedroom h...

The BRE Innovation Park (Building Research Establishment) that lies 15km north of Toronto will soon build a new series of houses in which emerging building products and technologies can be researched and enhanced. The Sustainable Technologies Evaluation Program (STEP) is run out of The Living City Campus at Kortright, ...

Canada continues to demonstrate its progress in fighting climate change with 204 registered and 211 certified LEED  projects in Canada between May and September 2015. This brings the current total number of LEED certified projects in Canada to 2,466 – second highest in the world. Buildings play a critical role in the b...

What is "FSC Certified" lumber? The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international, not-for-profit organization created in 1994 whose mission is promoting responsible forest management and the production of sustainable lumber and wood products via their "FSC wood certification labels".  Their goal is to protect n...

Three years ago, professor Lucas Brown’s students in Green Mountain College’s Renewable Energy and Ecological Design (REED) class built a custom-designed tiny house, a 96-square-foot structure with a sleeping loft “upstairs” and a 300-watt solar powered electrical system. This semester, his class went one better, con...

  For those that aren't made for the bustling lifestlyle of cities, small towns can be a dream come true. The nature of small towns is one of community and accessible downtown cores. Essential services like grocery stores, banks and post offices are usually grouped closely together, as are schools, so children can ofte...

While governments have a role in shaping and improving the built environment through zoning, development bylaws and other means, developers also play a large role. They choose where to build, the types of homes or buildings that get built, and many of the details that make up a home, neighbourhood and community.  The b...

Finding sustainable wood: We live in a country with over 400 million hectares of forest, so the supply is there; it's simply a case of properly managing it. That also means that when we cut one down, we should plant another. Wood is a renewable material, requires little processing and can almost always be purchased loc...

It is well-documented that indoor air is filled with contaminants, mostly due to cooking (specifically burning) and improperly vented combustion appliances (woodstoves, gas water heaters, gas ranges, etc.). Following that would be formaldehyde, VOCs and other chemicals in building materials and furnishings. All these f...

Are laminate counters good? Laminate countertops were a long-time staple of residential kitchen & bathroom construction, but they started to fall off in popularity around the time rockstars stopped wearing spandex, which was somewhere in the 80s. A trend started at that time towards alternatives to laminate counter...