world-green-building-week / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Courtesy of the USGBC, the following is a guest post by Harvey M. Bernstein, Vice President of Industry Insights & Alliances, McGraw-Hill Construction and John Mandyck, Chief Sustainability Officer for United Technologies Climate, Controls & Security. There is no doubt that sustainability initiatives and envir...

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...

With write-ups in Gizmag, Inhabitat, Tiny House Design, FastCoExist and well, too many other places to recount, one could say it's clear that the green building world is enamoured with this Tiny House gem, and so are we. What's not to love: NOMAD Micro Homes are sustainably manufactured, easy to assemble, affordable, a...

Bluewater Health announced today that it has been selected as one of the first Canadian hospitals – and the first acute care hospital in Ontario – to achieve LEED® certification. Bluewater Health’s construction of a 588,000-square-foot complex at the hospital’s Sarnia location consisted of a new addition attached to th...

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has released its list of the top 10 countries for LEED® outside of the United States, on which Canada ranked No. 1. The list demonstrates the global reach of the movement that is transforming the built environment into healthy, high-performing structures that benefit the planet a...

Net Zero Energy Homes pilot program goals The goal of the R-2000 Net Zero Energy homes pilot program in Canada was to improve the performance standards of homes, and to raise awareness of energy-efficient green home building techniques among builders. Through participating in this pilot project, every builder became li...

Powerhouse Paris Proof is a relatively new building standard that originated in Norway that is based on the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°Celsius  target. The standard lists maximum and total CO2 emissions per square metre, which includes the construction phase, energy in operation, material use and disposal. The standard spec...

Net Zero Homes - the design & certification process In May of 2017, the Canadian Home Builders Association [CHBA] officially launched its Net Zero Home Labelling Program, following the successful completion of a 15-month pilot project to validate technical and administrative procedures for building net zero homes i...

Why pay for a green home certification? As more people pursue high efficiency green home rating certifications, they become increasingly well known and trusted. Consequently, more people seek them out. Developers build smarter homes when consumers demand them, and the existence of certification programs raises the bar ...

With the recent COP26 Global Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, all the world's countries are talking carbon emissions amidst a certain amount of finger-pointing. In the closing minutes as the sustainable world watched the much applauded COP26 conference and a host of private jets were revving up their eng...

        See the first LEED V4 Platinum house in Canada here. As a movement and an industry, green building is evolving rapidly. Recognizing leadership in this field means periodically moving the goal posts, and rethinking the measures by which leadership is assessed. That’s the reason for LEED Version 4, the next exc...