Toronto City Council earlier this month took a significant step towards reducing embodied carbon in new buildings with a new policy that offers cash incentives – from $2,400 to almost $5,300 per apartment, depending on size – for builders who voluntarily limit the embodied carbon in their projects to a series of caps established for various categories of structures. The move, which will be embedded in Version 4 of Toronto Green Standard, comes less than a year after Council voted to eliminate parking minimums for new condos and rental buildings – a decision that will result in smaller garages and less concrete consumption.
“We were all focused for a long time on the operational energy,” says Jane Welsh, Toronto’s environmental policy project manager. "Understanding the materials is very important." The new embodied carbon caps – 250 kgCO2e/m2 and 350 kgCO2e/m2 – reflect testing done by the U of T team, which benchmarked about 550 buildings of various sizes and uses and estimated the life cycle carbon for each. The caps are set at approximately the median for embodied carbon, meaning they're sufficiently aggressive to generate savings but not out of reach of current approaches.”
The new embodied carbon caps – 250 kgCO2e/m2 and 350 kgCO2e/m2 – reflect testing done by the U of T team, which benchmarked about 550 buildings of various sizes and uses and estimated the life cycle carbon for each. The caps are set at approximately the median for embodied carbon, meaning they're sufficiently aggressive to generate savings but not out of reach of current approaches. A more intensive set of caps is applied to all city projects, as well as the thousands of new rental units planned for city-owned land parcels around Toronto. Like B.C.'s Step Code, the Toronto Green Standard is revised regularly, with each so-called tier becoming progressively more stringent; Tier 1 is mandatory.
Toronto's move puts it in a growing class of cities, regions and governments that have or are making similar efforts to regulate and push down embodied carbon, among them Vancouver and California. Canada’s federal government has indicated it will require a 30% reduction of embodied carbon in the structural materials of new public buildings as of 2025.