Sustainability

The BCIT Rivers Institute is focused on the protection and restoration of rivers, streams, estuaries, lakes and wetlands in British Columbia.

The Centre for Architectural Ecology – Collaborations in Living Architecture, Acoustics and Building Science supports the academic, design, and construction communities to understand architectural and building acoustics and advance living architecture technologies in this region.

The Factor Four initiative aims for a four-fold (75%) reduction in energy and materials consumption in six buildings in order to achieve ecological sustainability.

The BCIT Zero Energy Building (ZEB) Learning Centre was created to help the construction industry transition to the latest energy efficient building codes.

BCIT plays an important role in advancing sustainability in various sectors. Danica Djurkovic and Selina Liu will share how BCIT advances sustainability in the building sector. BCIT has a carbon reduction target of 33% reduction by 2023 and 50% reduction by 2030. Danica and Selina from Campus Planning and Facilities will discuss how we meet these targets which includes everything from state-of-the art new buildings, low-carbon district energy system and building automation system optimization.

Speaker: Danica Djurkovic, Architect AIBC, LEED® AP, Vice President, Campus Planning and Facilities, BCIT

Danica is the Vice President Campus Planning and Facilities, and a member of the BCIT executive leadership team. Danica provides strategic leadership and vision for the BCIT campuses planning and development, as well as facilities services and operations. Danica is passionate, visionary strategic leader with over 30 years of experience in the private, non-profit and public sector. Danica and her team at the City of Vancouver won the 2020 Canada Green Building Council Government Leadership in Sustainability Award recognizing achievements in forward vision, strategies, planning, and development of facilities. She also served as a President of Architectural Institute of BC.

Speaker: Selina Liu, P.Eng, Energy Manager, BCIT
Selina is a professional engineer, which a background in building automation systems. Her dedication to sustainability has led her to a career in energy efficiency, high performance buildings and energy management. Selina joined BCIT in June 2021 and leads the Energy Team in CPF in saving energy and leading GHG reduction implementation at BCIT.

The Maplewood Marine Restoration Project is located on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, approximately two kilometres east of the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, in a marine site that was identified as a restoration priority by the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. The site lies within a large marine tidal area immediately south of a wildlife conservation area. The project has restored ~4.5 hectares of habitat within this basin by creating a tidal flat, an eelgrass bed and a rock reef.

Charlotte Olson, Geo, PMP, Manager, Habitat Development, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority
Charlotte Olson is the Manager, Habitat Development at the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, Canada’s largest port. Working within the port authority’s Ecosystems Management & Environmental Programs Department, Charlotte is responsible for overseeing a project portfolio. This includes providing leadership and project management to a multi-disciplinary team in the delivery of large-scale habitat enhancement projects across the port’s jurisdiction.

Vanessa Koo, Senior Project Coordinator, Habitat Development, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority
Vanessa Koo is a Senior Project Coordinator for Habitat Development at the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority with over 10 years of public and private sector experience in the environmental field. Vanessa oversees annual monitoring, maintenance and adaptive management of the port authority’s 13 habitat bank sites, helping to administer the largest fish habitat bank in Canada under agreement with DFO.

On November 5, 2019, City of Vancouver Council unanimously approved an ambitious green rainwater infrastructure and urban rainwater management initiative called the Rain City Strategy. The strategy and its action plans reimagine how we can manage rainwater, representing a significant opportunity to take bold strides toward becoming a water-sensitive city.

Green rainwater infrastructure is a suite of rainwater management tools that use both engineered and nature based solution to protect, restore and mimic the natural water cycle. They include practices such as rain gardens, bioretention, green roofs, rainwater harvesting, permeable pavement, infiltration systems and absorbent landscapes. Over the next 30 years, the city plans to use green rainwater infrastructure solutions to not only help manager rainwater, but also to mitigate climate change, improve water quality, increase ecosystem services and green spaces, reduce urban heat island effect, and improve livability in the city.

Melina Scholefield, Manager of the Green Infrastructure Implementation Branch at the City of Vancouver will provide an overview of the Rain City Strategy, including the imperatives for change, the transformative directions and actions the city is taking to achieve its vision of becoming a water-sensitive city. This presentation will also talk about the role that engineering, ecology, landscape design and architecture, and green building all have to play in transforming Vancouver into the Rain City.

Speaker: Melina Scholefeild, P. Eng., Manager, Green Infrastructure Implementation, City of Vancouver

Melina is a professional engineer with over two decades of public and private sector experience. She has a long-standing dedication to sustainability and innovation in the municipal sector, leadership development and collaboration across disciplines. Melina is Manager of Green Infrastructure Implementation for the City of Vancouver. She and her team are leading City’s ambitious Rain City Strategy, a cross-departmental green rainwater infrastructure and urban rainwater management initiative.

DIRTT Environmental Solutions (Doing It Right This Time) uses its proprietary 3D software to design, manufacture and install fully customized prefabricated interiors. The company’s customers in the corporate, government, education and healthcare sectors benefit from DIRTT’s precise design and costing; rapid lead times with the highest levels of customization and flexibility; and faster, cleaner construction.

Jessie Stenftenagel, DIRTT Sustainable Design and Construction

Jessie Stenftenagel is a Sustainability Specialist with DIRTT (Doing it Right This Time) Environmental Solutions. Based in Chicago, she focuses on sustainability education for both clients and DIRTT Sales Teams, demonstrating how the company’s commitment to true sustainability underpins technology-driven manufactured construction to create exciting, practical and environmentally responsible interior spaces. Jessie holds a Master of Science (MSc) in Environmental Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and she is committed to supporting the environment through the implementation of sustainability strategies across all industries with a focus on future-proof environments. From marine biology to the built environment, she works to connect the dots between business and science, people, and the planet.

Globally, many regulatory and policy initiatives are proving advantageous to wood. As well, new requirements for performance, aspirations for affordability and expectations for healthy buildings are changing how buildings are designed and how they function.  At the same time, there is a systemic upheaval occurring in the building sector as companies adjust to new design, project managements and productivity issues.

While not all of these factors are regulatory, they are considerations that the building sector deals with every day and, for the most part, there are solutions offered by increasing the amount of wood used, especially mass timber products. This presentation explores how mass timber products are made, onsite construction, how users interact with the building, and the role mass timber plays in the future of sustainable construction.  It will discuss how the following changes occurring globally are opportunities to advance wood and have it included in the repertoire of designers, engineers and builders.

Speaker: Peter Moonen, National Sustainability Manager, Canadian Wood Council

Peter has more than 30 years experience dealing with regulatory, environmental, sustainability and operational issues. He is National Sustainability Manager for the Canadian Wood Council (CWC), a technical and knowledge transfer organization, which provides free technical support to designers, contractors, building and fire officials, owners and regulators to build a strong wood culture in Canada through education, training and awareness. He regularly presents on achieving greater sustainability, durability and the appropriate use of wood in Asia, Europe and throughout North America to design professionals, contractors, educators, regulators and building officials.

The Sustainability Framework recognizes that production starts with ecosystems from which we derive natural resources. Natural resources are turned into the commodities used to construct and operate built environments with the help of engineered systems. The wastes from these activities are absorbed by ecosystems to re-produce natural resources.

Six themes have been established to guide the School in its implementation of the Sustainability Framework. These themes reflect the inter-relatedness of ecological, social and economic interests needed to meet the challenge of sustainability:

• Protect and strengthen assets
• Balance use and renewal of resources
• Account for all costs and benefits
• Reduce waste and eliminate toxicants
• Ensure safety and access to services
• Support opportunities for improvement and enjoyment

Protect and strengthen assets:
Assets include: the natural environment, such as rivers, forests, species (e.g. salmon); social values and relationships expressed through cultural heritage, youth as contributors to society, aboriginal or ethnic knowledge; and economic capital, such as equipment and infrastructure.

Balance use and renewal of resources:
This means don’t take more than nature can produce on a sustained basis year after year. An example is the use of certified wood products that are harvested on a sustained yield basis.

Account for all costs and benefits:
This means going beyond the bottom line to include full life-cycle costs and costs that may not be financial but still have an impact (e.g. social and environmental costs). Although it is sometimes hard to do, the intention is to be more holistic in our approach. The cheapest price doesn’t always mean it is the best choice–especially when long-term operating costs are considered, or if the product has externalized costs associated with it that either someone else or something else pays for (e.g. pollution, unethical treatment of workers).

Reduce waste and eliminate toxicants:
This means that any product that creates a persistent or hazardous pollution condition in its manufacture, use or decomposition should be avoided. Choose products that can be reused or recycled over ones that cannot.

Ensure safety and access to services:
Safety should be inherent in everything we do and should be a factor in the choices of products we purchase and use. Risk management decisions include not only immediate impacts to the interests of the Institute, its faculty, staff and students, but also to the environment and to other communities that are affected either immediately or cumulatively over a longer-term as a result of decisions and actions. Access to services implies locality and availability of products and support services for their maintenance (there are social implications that may be harder to map: e.g. services that support training and upgrading of skills).

Support opportunities for improvement and enjoyment:
The learning environment should be enjoyable to the degree that we can support opportunities for continuous improvement of skills and learning opportunities, empower people through the learning process, and provide fun and stimulating opportunities to innovate and improve.

The School of Construction and the Environment is the lead Academic Sponsor of the International Ecocity Standards (IES). This initiative forwards the School’s goals of advancing applied research and the industry state of practice. The IES has 18 standards pertaining to sustainable urban living grouped under urban design, bio-geophysical conditions, socio-cultural features, and ecological imperatives. Learn more about the ways BCIT is creating ecocities at the Centre for Ecocities, or check out Building the Ecocity [PDF] and Education in Sustainable Built Environments [PDF] course offerings.

The Factor Four initiative is a project on the North end of campus aimed at creating an ecologically sustainable microcosm or “Ecocity Fractal”. Working as a living lab project we demonstrated sustainable practices on campus, providing opportunities to engage students in the transformation of the built environment as an ecologically sustainable learning space.

In 2009, BCIT School of Construction and the Environment hosted a charrette to look at the Science of Ecocity Building [PDF] on campus and undertook background research [PDF] on what it would mean to create an Ecocity Fractal. In 2012 we hosted follow up sessions with Ecocity Builders including a workshop exploring how the International Ecocity Standards could be applied to a Vancouver context [PDF], and a session focusing on the BCIT campus [PDF]. As an outcome of the BCIT workshop we launched the Eco-Streets [PDF] project, part of the Factor Four initiative. In 2016, a focus lab on the Headline Indicators for International Ecocity Standards was held at the BCIT Downtown Campus.