Event: The Economics of Sustainability

Last night I attended an event put on by CSC (Construction Specifications Canada) with Mark. It was on “The Economics of Sustainability”. A hot topic, seeing as how the event sold out and many discussions continued to take place well beyond ending time. 

I really enjoyed what Nadine Gutz had to say. She’s from a company called Interface, which makes carpets from recycled nylon. And hearing from Economist Rob Conboy at Better, which is trying to get the ball rolling on financing sustainable building practices in the US. This is hugely important because there will be no widespread adoption unless the economics make sense.

Gunter Lang, from the Passivehaus Network in Austria also spoke. He's been building these houses for 20 years now and walked us through some European Passivhaus projects. Did you know that in Brussels, all public buildings MUST be build to Passivhaus? In Vienna, they are building Passivhaus skyscrapers? And in Heidelberg they are building a whole 7,000 unit community, including grocery stores, schools and even brothels, to Passivhaus? It's so commonplace over there. It wasn't 20 years ago. We're on the foothills of the revolution over here. 95% of the evening’s conversation ended up being about Passivhaus. Wow.

Adam Cronk, from Green Giant Design Build, introduced our house and our blog. I love this guy. His mandate is to “embarrass builders” by showing how affordable it can be to build by building pre-fab. Hip hip hooray. We are super excited to be working with Adam on our project.

So now the community knows about our blog. It's really happening. And I feel very excited by the level of enthusiasm there was at the event last night.

And now for some comic relief:

Slide from Gunter's presentation. An advert for Passive House from <can't recall where>. Apologies to those whose heads I've cut off.