Victoria — A few weeks ago, Ladena Racine and her family moved into the first building to open at Victoria's Dockside Green, Canada's greenest condo development.
From the outside, the building, located on former industrial land adjacent to Victoria's Inner Harbour, looks pretty much like any new condominium.
"If you didn't know it was a green building, you'd just walk in and think it was another condo," says Ms. Racine, a 29-year-old elementary teacher.
Certainly, the immediate environment is not particularly green — at least not yet. While the first few buildings are finished and residents have moved in, a large part of the six-hectare project — which will eventually have 26 buildings and 2,500 residents — is still under construction or a sea of mud. And the adjacent Inner Harbour is still ringed with unsightly shipyards and old industrial buildings.
Developer Joe Van Belleghem stands atop the site of a future stream at the Dockside Green project in Victoria. While construction continues on buildings, the first group of residents are moving in to their super-green condos. (Diana Nethercott for The Globe and Mail)
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But if you look closely, you see that Dockside Green is a groundbreaking development, setting standards that could eventually become the norm for new residential buildings across Canada.
That's what appealed to Ms. Racine and her Web designer husband Neil Tran, 33, who have always been interested in environmental issues and wanted "a nice clean start" for their one-year-old daughter, Cyan.
When they heard about Dockside Green two years ago, Ms. Racine said, "we were just amazed with all the special features the building was going to have." On top of that, she says, "we believe in what it stands for."
Their $400,000 condo, just under 1,000 square feet, offers two bedrooms and a balcony in addition to its eco-friendly design.
Some of the green attributes of the finished buildings are no big surprise and can be found in many new structures: All units have motion sensing switches, low flow faucets and energy efficient appliances. The rooftops are green, with flower beds and communal gardens, while there is on-site parking for vehicles owned by car sharing services.
Other concepts, however, are novel.
The entire complex will soon have its own sewage and wastewater treatment plant that will return water to flush toilets in each suite, and will also be used to feed a creek and pond system that runs through the development.
Also under construction is an on-site biomass gasification plant, to turn waste wood into energy that will provide heat and hot water to all the units.
And each unit has a "smart" meter that monitors water, heat and electricity consumption, while a novel ventilation system brings in 100 per cent fresh air to each individual suite, rather than pushing air in through the corridors, as is done in most condos.
Even the construction is being done in as environmentally friendly a manner as possible: More than 90 per cent of construction waste is recycled, and the cement used in the building process is specially constituted to contain fly ash, a material that reduces carbon-dioxide emissions and strengthens the material.
Dockside Green, which is being built on cleaned-up industrial land that was once first nations property, is also being designed to be socially responsible. Its contractors have set up programs to help aboriginal workers gain construction skills, and jobs, by working on the project.
The $600-million complex will eventually house about 2,500 people; the first 98 apartments welcomed their owners in March. All the buildings on the site won't be finished until about 2014.
Developer Joe Van Belleghem, whose Windmill West development company is building Dockside Green along with partner VanCity credit union, says it is wrong to assume that environmentally positive attributes make a building more expensive to put up and run.
If it is planned and built carefully, higher costs in some areas can easily be offset by gains in others, he says. At Dockside Green, construction costs are about 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent higher than a normal project, but are more than matched by other savings, Mr. Van Belleghem says.
"A lot of things you do from an environmental perspective actually reduce your costs," he says, especially if architects, engineers, builders and landscapers work together to make sure a building is as efficient as possible.
For example, at Dockside Green the south- and west-facing windows have awnings and exterior blinds, insulation is increased, and special glazing is installed — all at higher cost — but less heating is required and there's no need for air conditioning, so other mechanical expenses are reduced.
Similarly, building the on-site sewage treatment plant is costly, but the complex will not have to pay sewage fees to the city because it doesn't use the municipal system.
And the development's energy efficient lighting, and biomass heating system, help reduce electricity consumption by about 60 per cent compared with a normal building, generating enormous savings over decades of use.
