Building Toward Low Cost and Carbon

Executive Summary

Canada needs to build. As housing costs are soaring, the country is embarking on a generational housing build-out, with five million more homes and their surrounding infrastructure needed to properly address Canada’s housing affordability crisis.

But woven into this very necessary build-out are some sizable but often overlooked climate implications. Specifically, manufacturing the construction materials that make up our buildings—from the concrete foundations to the drywall—creates between 20 to 120 tonnes of emissions per home. To put that in context, meeting the previous federal government’s housing plan (which would support nearly four million houses by 2030) was expected to generate the equivalent of more than a year’s worth of Canada’s total emissions by 2030. Thankfully, building cleaner doesn’t mean compromising on cost.

What’s more, with the U.S. no longer the reliable partner it once was, Canadian materials producers will be increasingly looking to the domestic market as well as other international partners like the EU for business. While this may seem tangential to our housing problems, there is a single elegant solution to a multi-layered issue: clean construction products and practices.

Designing buildings more efficiently and selecting materials that are made using cleaner processes and power sources can have a significant impact on the emissions embodied in a building or infrastructure project. Conveniently, as this report explores, many of these products are both cost-competitive and made in Canada—a dual opportunity to cut carbon and boost our homegrown industries.

Lower-carbon materials are already being produced across the country, from steel produced in electric arc furnaces to concrete mixes that reduce emissions while delivering the same performance, to low-emissions alternatives for drywall and insulation.

But at a time when we need to be building affordable housing, cost is key. This report looks at the price differential of using cleaner products and finds that lower-carbon equivalents are available in Canada at the same cost or for a negligible cost premium across almost all building materials and case studies explored. Where small premiums do exist, in most cases they add less than $3,000 for the material budget, which is a rounding error for multi-million dollar construction projects and falls within the price variations that construction projects face every day. Put simply, cutting carbon won’t break the bank.

In addition, our analysis found that designing lower- carbon buildings from the start and reducing the amount of material we use can reduce overall costs and compensate for any clean material premiums that do exist. Specifically, making a few deliberate changes like not overbuilding, or switching to above- ground parking garages, can reduce embodied emissions by as much as 41% while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in material costs.

Crucially, there are many countries in the world looking to slim down this slice of their emissions pie. By making the products that these jurisdictions want, Canada is moulding itself into a more competitive exporter to jurisdictions with carbon border adjustments like the EU. In a time of trade tensions, investing in Canadian-made clean materials is the right economic move.

But to be successful abroad, Canada should support its market here at home. “Buy Clean” policies, where governments require that cleaner materials are used in public construction projects, is the first and most important port of call. In fact, using this approach in public procurement policy could avoid up to 4 million tonnes of emissions by 2030 (the equivalent of 850 thousand cars).

In addition, governments should reevaluate building codes and design guidelines to remove unnecessary restrictions on lower-carbon designs while focussing on carbon performance over prescriptive requirements. Finally, they should remove any other barriers to clean construction including support for smaller producers to develop emissions-related data on their products.