BuildGreen Solutions is taking an energy and water guzzling 1920's home and turning it into a showpiece of sustainability. We are aiming to incorporate two of the most ambitious sustainability strategies in the world - Passive House and One Planet Communities (as a potential first single family home retrofit pilot project). We have a great site - a close walk to all kinds of wondrous urban amenities - but it is a tight one without a lot of elbow room. This tight urban site prevents us from using giant thick walls or massive PV arrays to achieve carbon neutrality from operations. Instead we will be relying on clever design and a rigorous attention to detail.
We'll be chronicling our successes, challenges and failures on this blog from design, through to construction and into occupancy. Our aim is to share our lessons learned broadly so that people can replicate, emulate and improve upon our work.
For a high-level description of our sustainability targets and strategies visit the Sustainability Action Plan page. We always welcome comments, thoughts and questions - feel free to contact us here.
Who is BuildGreen Solutions - BuildGreen is a development management and sustainability consulting firm that works on leading-edge green building projects with progressive partners. We are part of the Windmill Developments family of companies. This project is a continuation of our work in moving the bar higher for green development projects. It has been our great pleasure to work on some of the first LEED projects in North America, some of the first LEED Platinum projects (including the world's highest scoring LEED project ever - Dockside Green), some of the first LEED for Neighborhood Developments projects, and some of the first large-scale carbon neutral projects in the world (particularly with our friends at BioRegional and the One Planet Communities project). This small retrofit project allows us to test and apply lessons learned from those groundbreaking projects on the single family home scale. If we want to get to true sustainability we need to carefully retrofit existing neighborhoods and buildings. This is one small, but exciting, nudge in the right direction.
