A team of U of T Engineering researchers has some practical advice for developers, homeowners and urban planners who want to reduce their environmental impact. 

“Simply put, you should build as small as you can for what you need, and if possible, you should avoid having a basement,” says Professor Shoshanna Saxe (CivMin), senior author of a paper recently published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling. 

Saxe and her team are experts in life cycle analysis, a way of accounting for the environmental impact of new infrastructure. According to the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, buildings accounted for 38% of global carbon emissions in 2020, compared with only 23% from the transportation industry. This includes emissions produced during construction as well as operation, including natural gas heating or coal-powered electricity.  

“In downtown Toronto there are a lot of new condominiums going up, but if you look almost anywhere else, you’ll see that mostly what we’re building these days is single-family homes,” says Saxe. “That form is inherently challenging when it comes to carbon emissions, and it’s made more so by the fact that we’re building much bigger houses than we used to.” 

To analyze how newly constructed houses fare when it comes to environmental impact, Saxe and her team made use of publicly available data from the City of Toronto’s Committees of Adjustment. They were able to access detailed plans for 40 single-family homes set to be built in the city in 2020 and 2021. 

After extracting data on what materials were being used, in what quantities and for which components of the building, the team was able to calculate material intensity: a measure of how many kilograms of material are consumed either per square metre, per bedroom, or per building. This in turn provides a useful proxy for greenhouse gas emissions due to construction. 

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