Green building blocks
There's an interesting article in the 10th anniversary issue of Spacing: "Going green: 10 important policies that are making Toronto a more sustainable city" by Dale Duncan and Todd Irvine (winter 2013/2014, pp. 34-36). The policies are policies (and initiatives) "that have made Toronto greener over the past ten years" (p. 34).
One of them is a policy about green building in the city, the Toronto Green Standard. Readers may or may not be surprised to learn that "about half of Toronto's greenhouse gas emissions are generated from its buildings" (Duncan and Irvine, p. 34). The City made the standard mandatory in 2010. A new version became mandatory for new development in January of this year.
Old and new versions are available online and there are handy links to the Ontario Building Code and, within the standards, to pertinent LEED Canada documents. (LEED = Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, "a program that provides third-party verification of green buildings," according to the site of the U.S. Green Building Council, the group that developed the rating system. And customers ask about LEED almost as much as they ask for the building code.)
The LEED documents are a little handier, however, on the site of the Canada Green Building Council, under the LEED tab. (There is a Toronto Region chapter of the Canada council; see Chapters tab; but it's not a good source of documents; many of the links seems to be broken.)
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