Recently, Camosun College held the Solar Saturday exhibition at Interurban to profile green technology for students, green enthusiasts, and trades-people.
The event featured a series of workshops about solar water heating, LEED green building design, solar power, and wind power, as well as inspiring speeches from local alternative energy gurus Guy Dauncey and Dave Egles.
This was the first event of its type from the college and it was executed admirably.
Hopefully the college and our municipalities will continue to host more events like this to promote innovation and foster the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Another recent inspiring event was the Emerging Green Builders’ monthly meeting, which featured a discussion with Bernie Gaudet from the BC Ministry of Citizens Services.
While it’s encouraging that the government is promoting energy efficiency through entities like LiveSmart BC and by greening the building code, we still need more progressive and innovative policies like those that Emerging Green Builders advocate.
The Living Building Challenge and the Net Zero Challenge are two such initiatives, meant to test architects’ and developers’ abilities to design buildings that are truly sustainable, from generating clean energy to using non-toxic renewable resources in the construction process to incorporating water harvesting and treatment systems.
Adopting these progressive approaches as the new standard is the best way to make the construction industry much more sustainable.