June 28, 2010

Ontario Sustainable Construction and Resource Centre to showcase green buidling

IAN HARVEY

correspondent

A 60,000-square-foot-centre to showcase, train and explain the cutting edge in sustainable construction technologies is set to open in Vaughan, Ont. once final funding is in place.

The Ontario Sustainable Construction and Resource Centre (OSCAR) is billed as a long overdue addition to the construction green building support sector and will help the province catch up with jurisdictions like British Columbia that have a two- or three-year head start.

“In Vancouver, they have the Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre,” says Julie Scarcella, the driving force behind OSCAR, who has invested some $200,000 to get the project this far. “In Ontario we have nothing like that.”

Scarcella, a sustainable building consultant and project manager through her own company, Blue Wilderness Management Group, Inc., is executive director of OSCAR and has led the research into shaping what it should be over the past three years.

Based on case studies of 12 other sustainable research centres around the world — particularly in Europe where green building is more entrenched — OSCAR is being set up as a not-for-profit corporation that will run a “first-stop-shop” for professionals, trades, students and the public to “see, feel and touch” and get firsthand information about sustainable building practices.

For manufacturers, especially, OSCAR represents a place to showcase their products and to spread information about best practices, applications and training on installation and deployment.

Thus far, OSCAR has a potential home in a LEED platinum building but is searching for $250,000 to $500,000 in funding to develop programs.

“There’s no government funding so far at all,” says Scarcella, though on the positive side the concept has been warmly embraced by important construction industry voices such as the Toronto Construction Association, the Toronto Green Building Council and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers.

With some 62 per cent of construction activity in Canada centered in and around Ontario, there’s a strong demand for a facility like OSCAR, says David Bellamy, OSCAR’s vice-president and an engineer with MCW Consultants who specializes in HVAC building designs and energy innovations.

“But there’s a big disconnect between what politicians say and what the public wants,” he says adding the sustainable building sector is still very much in its infant stage.

“In MUSH (municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals), for example, for any project they have to get three prices, but how do you get three prices if you’ve got a unique sustainable technology?”

He says there are many entrepreneurs with great ideas making great products, but there’s a knowledge gap in how to deal with the construction industry.

“Things like delivering and storing materials at construction sites, for example,” he says. “Photovoltaic panels will be delivered, but they’ll sit around for weeks, even months, until the contractor is ready to put them up.

“Will they survive and work after that? We had a case where tubing for radiant floor heating sat around in the sun at a site and it changed the polymers and the tubing leaked. The maker had to start packaging the tubing in bags that could withstand the sun and being stored on a site.”

Manufacturers, contractors and building owners need to get on the same page when it comes to green technologies, says Bellamy, and that’s where OSCAR can play an important role.

“Right now, too often sustainable technologies are a bolt-on like a trophy because someone has decided to add it,” he says. “It’s not integrated into the overall plan enough.”

OSCAR would be a place for everyone — homeowners building owners, engineers trades, architects and operators — to investigate what’s new on the market and how it might best be applied to fit their plans.

Shane McCarthy is using his experience as training director at the United Association Refrigeration Workers of Ontario Local 787 as training director of OSCAR.

He says that having a place to consolidate sustainable technology offerings — and, more importantly, how they should be deployed — will be invaluable as the sector begins to become fully integrated into construction design.

“We’re all a little surprised we can’t get funding, but I suppose there are many other initiatives drawing from the same pot and when you’re spending a billion dollars in security for the G20 it’s hard for the money to stretch,” he says.

There are still many issues in sustainable technologies to be solved where OSCAR may be able to play a support role — and others where they will have to wait to be developed.

“For example, there’s no SEER rating for photovoltaic panels,” McCarthy says. “So how do we know the efficiency is, and what it will be later?”

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