Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/493534
Windmill's Dockside Green development in Victoria. A PR IL 2015 | 17 Precast Concrete PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY THE CEMENT ASSOCIATION OF CANADA One of the trends identified at the conference was an increased demand for transparency and precise data on building energy and water consumption. The conference also forecast increased demand for life cycle assessments and environmental product dec- larations. "Transparency is very important. And to build sustainability, you need lots of stakeholders at the table," Hall says. One of the speakers at the Pathway conference was Rodney Wilts, a partner at Windmill Development Group Ltd. Lyse Teasdale, director of communications at the Cement Association of Canada, points to some comments by Wilts in a recent article that give some f lavour of the sustainability potential of concrete. "Concrete has figured prominently in our portfolio of LEED Platinum buildings. LCA has helped us consider both the sustainability of concrete as a material as well as the role that concrete plays in meeting the sustain- ability performance objectives of our projects." Windmill's Dockside Green development in Victoria is one of a handful of projects from around the world to get the nod from the Clinton Climate Initiative as being climate positive development. Concrete played a critical role in garnering the recognition and achiev- ing the necessary quality. Besides the use of concrete slabs, columns and sheer walls for both structural heft and thermal mass, the project also deployed con- crete panels with recycled glass – for lobbies – reused abandoned slabs found buried on the site, and recycled waste concrete into blocks. It is perhaps projects like this that reflect the find- ings of a technical research bulletin sponsored by CPCI and done by Morrison Hershfield and the LCA project team at the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute. On the key metrics of lowest global warming potential (GWP) and lowest total primary energy (TPE), build- ings with a precast concrete envelope and cast-in-place concrete structure performed the best. Speed of construction and life cycle cost impact are part of the reason behind a trend to the increas- ing use of the total precast concept, according to Matt Balfe, national sales and marketing director, Precast Concrete Solutions, at Armtec. "Recent years have seen a move to this type of construction because of the focus on schedules and skilled labour shortages," says Balfe. A wide range of building types are now making extensive use of precast concrete in both the U.S. and Canada. These include multi-residential, mixed-use, institutional, industrial and parking garages. "Data centres, for example, are also moving to precast partly because of speed and life cycle cost, but also because of its versatility, thermal efficiency and multi-hazard protection," Balfe explains. Many schools in the U.S. are being built as total pre- cast and the trend is likely to spread wherever popula- tions tend to grow rapidly. Balfe adds that going the total precast route could, depending on project size, shorten a project timetable by six to eight weeks when compared with steel and even more when compared with cast-in-place con- crete construction. A