Green apartments
By Diana McLaren • Bankrate.com
In Irene Blacklock's 40-year-old apartment building
in Hamilton, Ont., the only opportunity to be environmentally responsible
is the enormous bin for recycling located, in a lane at the back
of the rear parking lot. So, like many of her fellow tenants, she
doesn't make the trek there loaded down with bottles and cans --
she simply throws them down the garbage-room chute. Her appliances
are old energy hogs, and she runs her space heater constantly in
the winter to combat drafts from her windows and flimsy balcony
doors.
Contrast this with the latest in green technology, such as apartments with motion detectors that turn heat on or off as you move from room to room. Or waste diversion centres with buttons to select paper, organic matter and such. And dual-flush toilets: select one for a three-litre flush and two for a six-litre flush -- a far cry from the whopping 20 litres an older standard toilet like the one in Blacklock's apartment uses.
Rental apartments are currently the poor cousins when it comes to energy-efficient buildings. Increasingly they are losing out to condominiums, houses and office buildings for one reason: hardly anyone builds new rental apartments anymore. And when you're talking green, the newer the better. But that is slowly starting to change.
Government initiatives lead the way
"In existing buildings, you're up against the existing physical environment," says Mike Singleton, executive director of Sustainable Buildings Canada. As environmental consultants, Singleton's company has advised developers large and small on how to achieve energy efficiency in their buildings. "The most significant factor is the design itself. It's built right in at the very beginning in terms of the site, the building materials, the design of the structures with such things as window placements." The advantage here goes to new construction.
Just like in school, there are tests, standards and awards for builders who construct with a view to energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. Rating systems provide the framework for what constitutes a green building, and one of the most prominent of these is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system. The Canada Green Building Council uses LEED's criteria and point system to conduct independent reviews of projects that apply for its ratings: certified, silver, gold or platinum.
The first high-rise residential building in Canada to achieve a LEED silver rating (there are no golds yet) is a Toronto high-rise condominium built by Minto Developments. Flush with this success, the company is going for gold in a new 148-unit high-rise rental apartment building now nearing completion and slated for spring occupancy in spring 2007.
"Achieving LEED designation is a rigorous process," says Andrew Pride, Minto's vice-president of energy management. "It is unbiased and requires a great deal of documentation. We are confident that with our new rental building, we will achieve at least silver, if not gold, LEED certification."
LEED's Green Building Rating System awards points (a minimum of 39 is needed for gold and between 33 and 38 for silver) in five categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources and indoor environmental quality. Extra points can be earned under a sixth category for exceptional environmental performance or innovation.
The apartment of the future
Minto's new rental building will be applying for credits in most of these areas, but the ones that affect tenants directly include:
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The apartment of the future: |
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Pride says the new building will feature an innovative system they developed for bringing fresh air into each apartment. It uses a heat recovery ventilator mounted near exterior walls. Contrast this with typical apartments where the only fresh air that enters the unit when windows are closed comes under the entrance door from the corridor. In Minto's system, this fresh outside air is warmed using heat captured from the bathroom's exhaust air.
"The benefits are three-fold," says Pride. "It provides a new source of fresh air, it provides energy recovery from the warm bathroom air and it creates circulation throughout the suite. It's cleaner because since the air is moving, the dust is also moving and doesn't settle as much."
Older buildings trying to go green, too
But with so few new rental buildings under construction, what of all the existing apartments that house the majority of tenants in major cities? Well, they're doing what they can with what they've got.
Mike Lithgow, energy manager for Greenwin Property,
another large developer that owns or manages thousands of apartments
in Canada, says they are moving on the conservation front where
they can given that they aren't starting with new rental construction.
Under a City of Toronto water conservation program, Greenwin has installed low-flush toilets and energy-efficient shower heads. This reduces not only the amount of water used, but also the considerable heat needed to heat it. A bonus, adds Lithgow, is that "tenants got new fixtures and leaky taps fixed."
Greenwin is also replacing light fixtures and old boilers in its buildings. And Lithgow is confident that with a big push coming from government, it's only a matter of time before apartments get individual meters to measure energy consumption.
Will this result in savings for tenants? Lithgow says
yes because "when you pay the actual cost, you use 20 per cent to
40 per cent less. Metering studies show that it's a small number
of tenants using massive amounts of hydro, and everybody else pays
for them."
Diana McLaren is a writer in Toronto.
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