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Carbon Neutral Now
Nice article about Yale's Kroon Hall and Victoria BC's Dockside Green as true carbon-neutral projects (with Dockside Green a model for building entire neighborhoods as green/ carbon neutral).
"Across the continent, at the southern tip of the mountainous and densely forested Vancouver Island, Dockside Green will soon become carbon neutral. A mix of town houses, mid-rise apartments, and commercial buildings being built on a brownfield at the edge of downtown Victoria, British Columbia, the large, multiphase urban development takes a comprehensive approach to carbon reduction, showing how much is possible at the neighborhood scale. "
Welcome to Vancouver 2.0 :: Photo Essay :: thetyee.ca
It starts as a photo-essay, but this being the Tyee, the comments muscle their way in to center stage, too. (An aside: I'm getting fed up with all the negative commentary that craps all over all newspaper - including Tyee and my local paper, Times-Colonist - articles that allude to anything creative, innovative, or full of change. It brings out all the usual suspects, who waste no time burying a good idea under cyncism and negativity. Ugh.)
Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast
Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of "90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres." The key aspect? They're all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.
If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.
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northwest of London, British developers are pulling one off on a scale that Americans are still only mocking up in Photoshop. The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab's promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.
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But the biggest advantage is improved build quality. The same precision manufacturing that makes an Ikea bookshelf easy to assemble makes the Oxley Woods homes nearly airtight. But that doesn't mean they aren't well-ventilated. Each abode has an environmentally responsible cherry on top: A self-contained unit called an EcoHat controls circulation with a tiny 10-watt fan, pushing out stale air and drawing in fresh stuff, which is then solar-heated to warm the house.
CivicInfo BC - News "New Green Building Proposals Combat Climate Change"
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Updates to the B.C. Building Code that will reduce the impact of buildings on the environment are now available online for public input, Minister responsible for Housing Rich Coleman has announced.
The Province committed to developing a unified green building code in the 2007 throne speech. Greening the B.C Building Code will fulfil this commitment by improving the energy and water efficiency of homes and other buildings, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It will also result in lower energy bills for British Columbians. -
- Houses, low-rise residential buildings and small commercial and industrial buildings would be required to install increased insulation or, in the case of housing, meet an increased EnerGuide rating.
- High rise residential buildings and larger commercial buildings must meet the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers 90.1(2004) standard. ASHRAE is an internationally recognized standard for energy efficiency in buildings.
- Use of ultra low-flow toilets and other water saving plumbing fixtures in all new buildings and additions to existing buildings.
Changes proposed in the first stage of greening the B.C. Building Code focus on improving sustainability through increased energy and water efficiency. The proposals would set the following requirements for new construction or additions to existing buildings, effective in spring 2008: - 2 more annotations...
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