Campuses as Living Laboratories of Sustainability

Initiatives & Projects

BCIT has been working on a wide range of projects that offer opportunities for multidisciplinary learning on campus through Living Labs since 2007. These projects utilize the natural features, infrastructure, and operations of our campuses to advance sustainability.

New buildings, like the Tall Timber Student Housing and the Trades and Technology Complex, allow us to share experience of innovative construction approaches like mass timber technology, and passive house in partnership with leading industry consultants.

Our schools run Living Labs projects spanning topics from ecological restoration, power transmission and generation, to energy systems, building technology, and materials. These often make use of our existing infrastructure to test new technologies.

Highlights of current Living Labs

Campus Development

Tall Timber Student Housing

The new 470 bed student housing building uses mass timber technology to provide sustainable and affordable housing for future BCIT students.

Trades and Technology Complex

A multi-building project anchored by the Concert Properties Centre for Trades and Technology that will transform trades education at BCIT.

Energy Upgrades

A suite of projects including the electrification of campus energy systems and the addition of sophisticated building controls to reduce BCIT's GHG emissions and meet our ambitious targets.

School & Applied Research

Factor Four

School of Construction and the Environment: Factor Four is a multi-building initiative designed to explore techniques for reducing energy and materials consumption by 75%.

Centre for Architectural Ecology Elevated Lab

School of Construction and the Environment: The Centre for Architectural Ecology research base in the Factor Four Area on the Burnaby campus is used to educate and train the next...

Smart Microgrid

Applied Research: The Smart Microgrid Program is a major research project exploring multiple aspects of power transmission, power generation, and measurement.

South Campus Wetland Ecological Restoration

School of Construction and the Environment: Students worked together in collaboration with staff to expand a small wetland at the south end of the Burnaby campus near Guichon Creek.

Environmental Monitoring & Analysis Project

BCIT students collaborated with the Vancouver International Airport (YVR) Innovation Hub to develop a water monitoring system for the airport.

Spartan Controls Centre

School of Energy: The Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research uses a state-of the-art power generation facility to explore energy production, distribution and management.

Tall Timber Student Housing

Tall Timber Student Housing Project Visulisation

The Tall Timber Student Housing project will provide affordable, sustainable housing for 470 BCIT students. It’s the first new student housing on the BCIT campus in over 40 years. The interior courtyard will link to the reimagined South Commons to enhance the pedestrian experience on campus. The use of mass timber construction will ensure this is a sustainable building as well as a beautiful centrepiece for the Burnaby campus.

The Campus Plan project webpage includes general information on the project, sustainability features, a live camera showing the project site and information on current construction and its impacts on the community.

Fast + Epp are the structural engineers for the project and have a page on their website about the project.

The CPF Vimeo site is where to find project videos including including drone footage, project updates and 3D renderings.

BCIT TTSH – What is Mass Timber

Trades and Technology Complex

The Trades and Technology Complex project will create a world-leading, adaptive learning environment for 21st-century trades education. Anchored by the Concert Properties Centre for Trades & Technology, the Complex includes multiple elements including the Robert Bosa Carpentry Pavilion, a Marine and Mass Timber Workshop, and a Campus Services Building. The project also includes the daylighting and ecological restoration of a section of Guichon Creek that is currently culverted.

Campus Energy Upgrade Projects

New developments meet leading environmental sustainability standards including LEED gold, passive house approach and Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) net-zero certification. BCIT also has a cross campus strategy to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions with projects including a complete renewal of the SE8 central heating plant will support the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy source(s) and create a low-carbon source of heat at the centre of Burnaby Campus.

Factor Four

Attic room with a latticed windowed roof casting a shadow on the floor.

Factor Four is a multi-building initiative designed to explore techniques for reducing energy and materials consumption by 75% without compromising service levels. It is led by the School of Construction and the Environment in the buildings it occupies at the Burnaby campus: the “Factor Four Area”. The majority of projects are completed under the living lab concept, allowing student to learn as we implement solutions.

The School of Construction and the Environment (SoCE) hosted a three day sustainability charrette facilitated by Ecocity Builders in 2009. The purpose was to work with staff, faculty and students to apply ecocity principles to envision the transformation of BCIT’s Burnaby campus into a living laboratory of sustainability. Over the course of the three days, the focus grew from small-scale efforts for immediate implementation to larger scale efforts to reduce energy and materials by a factor of four at the north end of the Burnaby campus (known as the Sustainability Precinct), to ambitious transformation of the entire campus to achieve factor-ten reductions in energy and materials consumption without compromising service levels. The name “Factor Four Initiative” was later adopted as it reflected the mid-term focus for action.

Located in the Northeast sector of the Burnaby campus, the Factor Four Area comprises buildings NE1 through NE8. These buildings house the majority of SoCE’s programs. Applied research in reducing the ecological footprint of education delivery and campus operations while maintaining or improving the student learning environment serves as a key theme to align the concept of BCIT campuses as living laboratories with the Factor Four Initiative.

BCIT's Factor Four Initiative

All of the projects that comprise the Factor Four Initiative are documented on the Factor Four web pages and include teaching resources such as case studies, videos, working drawings and real-time data feeds to enhance the learning environment for educational programs.

Explore the Factor Four website

Elevated Lab

people planting

The Centre for Architectural Ecology supports the academic, design, and construction communities to understand architectural and building acoustics and advance living architecture technologies in this region. The Elevated Lab serves as a living lab and collaborative catalyst within and between various departments at BCIT, including Carpentry, Steel Trades and Piping Trades, as well as Forestry and Natural Areas Management, Indigenous Initiatives, Campus head chefs, and Campus Planning and Facilities and more.

The Elevated Lab is used to educate and train the next generation of students and local professionals in leading-edge green roof, living wall, and green façade technologies. From green roof performance to acoustical architecture, through to urban ecology and rainwater harvesting, the Centre is pushing the envelope to understand and develop best practices for healthy cities, healthy people, and healthy ecosystems.

Architectural Ecology systems have many direct impacts on the environment and community, such as limiting stormwater runoff, insulating and protecting buildings, reducing noise pollution, limiting energy consumption, cleaning the air and introducing greater biodiversity into the urban cores. Over 200 BCIT students aided in the construction of the Lab.

Current research on the Elevated Lab is focused on Technologies and Ecologies. The ‘Technologies’ section of the Elevated Lab showcases a range of what is possible for extensive green roofs with limited load bearing capacity, including solar panels, a small wetland, food growing, and Indigenous designs symbolizing truth and reconciliation. The ‘Ecologies’ section is used to advance our understanding of the capacities of extensive green roof systems with respect to community ecology (plants, soils, pollinators), while advancing the practice of regenerative design for healthy cities and ecosystems.

An article written by Sean Murphy, a student in Broadcast & Online Journalism provides an interesting perspective.

The Centre for Architetural Ecology’s website provides a wealth of resources for students including case studies.

Smart Microgrid

The Smart Microgrid Program is led by the Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team (SMART), and involves partners across BCIT, government and industry. Our unique smart grid infrastructure provides students valuable experiential learning by working with the technology as well as key processes needed to support resilient electrical grids. It is an ideal living laboratory as it includes many scaled-down elements of the future smart grid that students can work with to support their education. For example, students in the Master of Engineering in Smart Grid Systems and Technologies program utilize data collected from the Energy OASIS to investigate operation, reliability, and sustainability challenges and issues.

What is SMART?

SMART advances the state of the electric power Smart Grid at national and international levels, working to:

Chart a “path from lab to field” for cost-effective technologies and solutions for Canada’s evolving smart electricity grid
Provide opportunities for electrical utility companies, technology providers and researchers to work together to develop architectures, protocols, configurations and models of the evolving Smart Grid
Enable Canadian researchers to develop and validate technologies required to meet Canada’s priorities for co-generation, efficient transmission and distribution of electricity, load control, demand response, advanced metering and integration of clean energy sources into the existing and future grids.

Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team (SMART)

SMART Research Areas

South Campus Wetland Ecological Restoration

wetland on campus

wetland image — The wetland during and after restoration.

In September 2020, students from the School of Construction and the Environment’s Ecological Restoration, Forest and Natural Areas Management, and Fish, Wildlife and Recreation programs, worked together in collaboration with staff to expand a small wetland at the south end of the Burnaby campus near Guichon Creek.

The students who worked on the wetland, and others, have continued to use the area as a living lab, observing it develop and thrive over time.

Aerial view of the BCIT Burnaby campus with the location of the South Wetland project indicated.

The Burnaby campus is the largest campus at 130.7 acres. The south end of campus has a forested area with second growth coniferous trees and other vegetation characteristic of its Coastal Western Hemlock biogeoclimatic zone (CWHdm). The campus is situated in the Brunette River watershed and Guichon Creek runs through campus from the south campus forest to the north end of campus. The campus grounds are regularly utilized for experiential student learning.

The existing wetland was very small and shallow and had been impacted by human activities, so the site was excavated to create a larger pond area. After construction, students planted native riparian and aquatic plants and the wetland filled naturally with groundwater. The aim of the project was to create a more diverse ecosystem that could support a number of birds, mammals, and amphibians while also slowing, filtering, and storing water within the Guichon Creek watershed.

The area is a unique living lab, providing students the opportunity to observe how the wetland recovers from the construction phase and thrives over time. A key component of an adaptive management approach to ecological restoration is ongoing monitoring and maintenance as well as analysis of the effectiveness of the restoration. In 2023, Ecological Restoration students were required to respond to a hypothetical Request for Proposal by developing a proposed monitoring plan that would assess wildlife habitat characteristics within the wetland and surrounding forested area. The students carried out many of their proposed monitoring methods including vegetation and bird surveys, water quality assessments, as well as monitoring the site using wildlife cameras. The cameras captured mallards, wood ducks, song sparrows, and a raccoon in and around the wetland.

South Wetland Restoration Project students return to BCIT

Read more about the wetland in the BCIT News

Environmental Monitoring & Analysis Project

Vancouver Airport from Plane After Takeoff showing the Fraser River Estuary.

In 2022, students from the School of Energy and School of Computing and Academic Studies joined forces with the BCIT Centre for Internet of Things and the Vancouver International Airport (YVR) Innovation Hub to collaborate on developing a water monitoring system. The purpose of which is to automate the collection and analysis of water quality in the Fraser River around the airport.

In 2021, Vancouver International Airport (YVR) partnered with the BCIT Centre for Internet of Things to obtain technical expertise and provide Living Labs for students and faculty to research new processes and technology from a wide variety of applications. The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to the billions of physical devices around the world that are now connected to the Internet, all collecting and sharing data. Connecting all these different objects and adding sensors to them adds a level of digital intelligence, enabling them to communicate real-time data without involving a human being. The IoT is making the fabric of the world around us smarter and more responsive, bridging the physical and digital worlds.

YVR is located on Sea Island in the Fraser River estuary with an elevation of three metres. It is vulnerable to rising sea levels, storm surges and high flood levels in the Fraser River. As part of the airport’s need to address climate change and rising sea levels, more accurate data is required to monitor the watershed off Sea Island.

Utilizing expertise from multiple disciplines, the project team designed and implemented:

A smart device using C programming to connect a wide range of sensors to an Arduino
Communication and power design addressing NB-IoT cellular communication and power consumption by the device, ensuring data is sent to the cloud
AWS cloud architecture to store the incoming data (mentored by external experts from Rackspace and Onica)
Web-based dashboard enabling the operator to monitor and track changes in real-time
Mechanical and electric design and fabrication of a working prototype

These stations will enable higher accuracy of measurements and enhanced sampling rates that will reduce labour costs while improving the quality of the data. The data is collected 24/7 and is stored in the cloud. When combined with sensor data installed into weather models and tide data, it provides a complete set of data for monitoring and analytics and predicting the flow of water around YVR.

The water monitoring station prototype was installed in Guichon Creek on BCIT’s Burnaby campus and went through several months of testing. Data monitored includes pH balance, conductivity, diffuse oxygen, water temperature, turbidity and Total Distributed Solids (TDS). The video below demonstrates the Guichon Creek prototype.

BCIT Centre for Internet of Things YVR Water Monitoring project

Read more at the BCIT News

Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research

An instructor and students inside the BCIT Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research — An instructor and students inside the Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research.

The Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research uses a state-of the-art power generation facility to explore energy production, distribution and management. The project is led by the School of Energy.

The School of Energy’s research focus is on energy systems and efficient energy processes with expertise and facilities in electrical and mechanical manufacturing, renewable energy, industrial processes and power engineering.

Forty-eight percent of all energy produced in Canada is consumed by industry. As such, any improvements in industrial processes have significant impacts on our overall consumption patterns. The Spartan Controls Centre on the Burnaby campus is a nexus for academic connection, drawing together academics and researchers from across the Institute. Students, faculty and operations personnel work together in a cross-disciplinary living lab learning and research environment focused on energy production, distribution, sustainability and management.

Highlights of the Spartan Controls Centre include:

The cleanest operating boiler in Western Canada, with controls to minimize emissions and maximize energy efficiency aligning us with the BC Government’s clean energy mandate.
A 220 kW electrical generator to harness the output from the boiler as part of BCIT’s SMART microgrid.
The multi-fuel boiler produces enough steam to supply multiple remote labs around campus, including the unit operations lab, the turbine co-generation lab, the pulp and paper lab, and the industrial instrumentation lab.
Many of the key economic industries including bitumen and pulp processing require huge amounts of heat and steam. The research and teaching will help to shift Canada’s industrial plants toward cleaner and more efficient modern technology and processes.
The centre is at the forefront of the greening of Canada’s industrial landscape.

BCIT's Spartan Controls Centre for Energy Education and Research Gives Students An Edge