The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top three universities in Canada. With an annual research budget of $759 million, UBC funds over 8,000 projects a year.
Infrastructure is the set of facilities and systems that serve a country, city, or other area, and encompasses the services and facilities necessary for its economy, households and firms to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and private physical structures such as roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications. In general, infrastructure has been defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions" and maintain the surrounding environment.
Sustainable living describes a lifestyle that attempts to reduce the use of Earth's natural resources by an individual or society. It is referred to as "zero wastage living" or "net zero living". Its practitioners often attempt to reduce their ecological footprint by altering their home designs and methods of transportation, energy consumption and diet. Its proponents aim to conduct their lives in ways that are consistent with sustainability, naturally balanced, and respectful of humanity's symbiotic relationship with the Earth's natural ecology. The practice and general philosophy of ecological living closely follows the overall principles of sustainable development.
Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is the collection and storage of rain, rather than allowing it to run off. Rainwater is collected from a roof-like surface and redirected to a tank, cistern, deep pit, aquifer, or a reservoir with percolation, so that it seeps down and restores the ground water. Dew and fog can also be collected with nets or other tools. Rainwater harvesting differs from stormwater harvesting as the runoff is typically collected from roofs and other surfaces for storage and subsequent reuse. Its uses include watering gardens, livestock, irrigation, domestic use with proper treatment, and domestic heating. The harvested water can also be committed to longer-term storage or groundwater recharge.
Green building refers to both a structure and the application of processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle: from planning to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition. This requires close cooperation of the contractor, the architects, the engineers, and the client at all project stages. The Green Building practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability, and comfort. Green building also refers to saving resources to the maximum extent, including energy saving, land saving, water saving, material saving, etc., during the whole life cycle of the building, protecting the environment and reducing pollution, providing people with healthy, comfortable and efficient use of space, and being in harmony with nature Buildings that live in harmony. Green building technology focuses on low consumption, high efficiency, economy, environmental protection, integration and optimization.’
A Zero Energy Building (ZEB), also known as a Net Zero Energy (NZE) building, is a building with net zero energy consumption, meaning the total amount of energy used by the building on an annual basis is equal to the amount of renewable energy created on the site or in other definitions by renewable energy sources offsite, using technology such as heat pumps, high efficiency windows and insulation, and solar panels.
Suzlon Energy Limited is an Indian multinational wind turbine manufacturer based in Pune, India. It was formerly ranked by MAKE as the world's fifth largest wind turbine supplier.
The sustainable city, eco-city, or green city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 defines sustainable cities as those that are dedicated to achieving green sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. They are committed to doing so by enabling opportunities for all through a design focused on inclusivity as well as maintaining a sustainable economic growth. The focus also includes minimizing required inputs of energy, water, and food, and drastically reducing waste, output of heat, air pollution – CO2, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register first coined the term ecocity in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, where he offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere. Other leading figures who envisioned sustainable cities are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.
Masdar City is a planned city project in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Its core is being built by Masdar, a subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, with the majority of seed capital provided by the Government of Abu Dhabi. Designed by the British architectural firm Foster and Partners, the city relies on solar energy and other renewable energy sources.
Green building on college campuses is the purposeful construction of buildings on college campuses that decreases resource usage in both the building process and also the future use of the building. The goal is to reduce CO2 emissions, energy use, and water use, while creating an atmosphere where students can be healthy and learn. Universities across the country are building to green standards set forth by the USGBC, United States Green Building Council. The USGBC is a non-profit organization that promotes sustainability in how buildings are designed and built. This organization created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, which is a certification process that provides verification that a building is environmentally sustainable. In the United States, commercial and residential buildings account for 70 percent of the electricity use and over 38 percent of CO2 emissions. Because of these huge statistics regarding resource usage and emissions, the room for more efficient building practices is dramatic. Since college campuses are where the world's future leaders are being taught, colleges are choosing to construct new buildings to green standards in order to promote environmental stewardship to their students. Colleges across the United States have taken leading roles in the construction of green building in order to reduce resource consumption, save money in the long run, and instill the importance on environmental sustainability on their students. It is a better way to motivate new generation to live a sustainable life.
The City of Calgary Water Centre is the headquarters of Calgary's Water Resources and Water Services' staff, housing its 460 professional and 314 field staff. The four-storey office building was completed in 2008, and upon opening was both the largest LEED-rated office building in Alberta and Alberta's first Gold-certified building. The building was designed through a collaboration between Sturgess Architecture and Manasc Isaac.
The C. K. Choi Building is a building known for its sustainable design features. It is the University of British Columbia's "flagship environmental building" in what it calls its 'living laboratory', the campus used to showcase "innovative approaches to conserving energy, water and materials, while striving to make positive impacts on the environment." Located in the northwest quadrant of the UBC campus, the building is named after Dr. Cheung-Kok Choi, a businessman and philanthropist in China, Hong Kong and Canada, and a major donor to UBC. The C.K. Choi Building was purpose-built as a university office building to house UBC's Institute of Asian Research's five research centres. These focus on China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and India and South Asia. The "daringly innovative architecture" integrates cultural expression, interior and exterior architectural presence, together with environmental features and functions. The five identical curved roof forms reflect the institute's Asian focus, providing an identifiable focus for each research centre without giving predominance to one culture or centre over another, and provide natural light and natural ventilation to interior spaces.
Green building is a technique that aims to create structures that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout their lifecycle – including siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition. A 2009 report by the U.S. General Services Administration evaluated 12 sustainably designed GSA buildings and found they cost less to operate.
Green urbanism has been defined as the practice of creating communities beneficial to humans and the environment. According to Timothy Beatley, it is an attempt to shape more sustainable places, communities and lifestyles, and consume less of the world's resources. Urban areas are able to lay the groundwork of how environmentally integrated and sustainable city planning can both provide and improve environmental benefits on the local, national, and international levels. Green urbanism is interdisciplinary, combining the collaboration of landscape architects, engineers, urban planners, ecologists, transport planners, physicists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and other specialists in addition to architects and urban designers.
The Creative Energy Homes (CEH) project is a showcase of energy-efficient homes of the future. Seven homes constructed on the University Park Campus of the University of Nottingham are being designed and constructed to various degrees of innovation and flexibility to allow the testing of different aspects of modern methods of construction including layout and form, cladding materials, roof structures, foundations, glazing materials, thermal performance, building services systems, sustainable/renewable energy technologies, lighting systems, acoustics and water supply. The project aims to stimulate sustainable design ideas and promote new ways of providing affordable, environmentally sustainable housing that are innovative in their design. The homes are fully instrumented and occupied in order to provide comprehensive post occupancy evaluation data.
Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being includes the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations. In the context of contemporary urbanism, the term cities refers to several scales of human settlements from towns to cities, metropolises and mega-city regions that includes their peripheries / suburbs / exurbs. Sustainability is a key component to professional practice in urban planning and urban design along with its related disciplines landscape architecture, architecture, and civil and environmental engineering. Green urbanism and ecological urbanism are other common terms that are similar to sustainable urbanism, however they can be construed as focusing more on the natural environment and ecosystems and less on economic and social aspects. Also related to sustainable urbanism are the practices of land development called Sustainable development, which is the process of physically constructing sustainable buildings, as well as the practices of urban planning called smart growth or growth management, which denote the processes of planning, designing, and building urban settlements that are more sustainable than if they were not planned according to sustainability criteria and principles.
The Biomass Research and Demonstration Facility uses biomass to create clean heat and energy. This facility is located at 2329 West Mall in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia's West Point Grey Campus. Official operation began in September 2012, by combining syngas and gasification conditioning systems with a Jenbacher engine. The highest potential output of this system is 2 MWe (megawatts) of electricity and 9600 lbs of steam per hour. This system is the first of its type in all of Canada, and it was put together by the cooperation of three parties: General Electric (GE), Nexterra, and the University of British Columbia (UBC).
Rainwater harvesting is becoming a procedure that many Canadians are incorporating into their daily lives, although data does not give exact figures for implementation. Rainwater can be used for a number of purposes including stormwater reduction, irrigation, laundry and portable toilets. In addition to low costs, rainwater harvesting is useful for landscape irrigation. Many Canadians have started implementing rainwater harvesting systems for use in stormwater reduction, irrigation, laundry, and lavatory plumbing. Provincial and municipal legislation is in place for regulating the rights and uses for captured rainwater. Substantial reform to Canadian law since the mid-2000s has increased the use of this technology in agricultural, industrial, and residential use, but ambiguity remains amongst legislation in many provinces. Bylaws and local municipal codes often regulate rainwater harvesting.
The Greenest City action plan (GCAP) is a City of Vancouver urban sustainability initiative. Its primary mission is to ensure that Vancouver becomes the greenest city in the world by the year 2020. The GCAP originated based on the 2009 work of the Greenest City Action Team, a committee co-chaired by Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson. The GCAP was approved by Vancouver city council in July 2011.
Peter Busby is an architect and Managing Director at Perkins & Will Architects, with a background in philosophy and a history of advancing sustainable design. Throughout his career, he has advocated for sustainable building strategies and integrated green building infrastructure that serves to educate the users of his spaces.
