Making a Case for Heritage: Building Conservation

Retrofitting old buildings may be the most important action to mitigate climate change.

This section will help you to describe the importance of building conservation.

The first section provides impressive statistics to back up your case.

The second section provides ideas to help you to develop your local case.

Retention and conservation make good environmental sense

Buildings have been identified as the largest single source of energy use, waste, and omissions into the atmosphere. Close to half of the greenhouse gases produced in Canada come from buildings.

Buildings are vast storerooms of energy
It takes energy to extract raw materials from the earth and energy to manufacture finished building materials, more energy to transport those materials to a construction site, and still more energy to assemble the building. All of this energy, the total energy required to produce and maintain the building over its entire lifecycle is known as embodied energy. If a building is demolished and taken to the landfill, the embodied energy is wasted. There is a tremendous impact on the environment when something new is built. Avoiding new construction by retaining and reusing heritage buildings is an ecologically conscious decision.

Buildings are producers of carbon
Carbon emitted through building construction, including the entire process of extraction, fabrication, transportation, and assembly is called embodied carbon. When an existing building is demolished and a new building is erected, the carbon footprint is much larger than that of a retrofitted or rehabilitated building, in which its life-cycle carbon is largely already spent.

New buildings do not provide simple answers
While new buildings meeting today’s highest energy efficiency standards typically consume less energy for heating and cooling than older buildings without energy-saving retrofits, demolition of a heritage building ignores the fact that many new building materials require a tremendous amount of energy to produce and most cannot be reused or recycled.

Impacts in numbers

• It takes a lot of energy to construct a building. For example, building a 50,000 square foot (4645 m2) commercial building requires the same amount of energy it takes to drive a car 20,000 miles (32,187 kilometres) a year for 730 years.
• Recent research shows that it takes 35 to 50 years for an energy efficient, new building to save the amount of energy lost in demolishing an existing building.
• It is known that “even the most energy-efficient new building cannot offset its embodied energy for many years. The United Nations Energy Programme estimates that the embodied energy of a building is 20% if a building is operational for 100 years… the shorter the service life, the greater the ratio of embodied energy to operating energy is”.
• In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “… over the whole building stock, the largest portion of carbon savings by 2030 is in retrofitting existing buildings and replacing energy-using equipment…”
• Approximately 25% of Canada’s waste stream, is made up of construction, renovation and demolition waste.
• Demolition projects produce 20 -30 times more waste material per square meter than renovation or construction projects.
• According to the Building Materials Reuse Assoc., demolishing a 2,000 square-foot house, for example, sends 60 tons of material to the landfill, 85% of which could have been reused.

• 20% of all Canadian landfill is occupied by used construction material
• 50% of construction waste is salvageable and reusable
• 45% of construction waste is recyclable
  

Analyzing available Canadian data, Parks Canada provided the following information in the report “Historic Places Matter”:

• The embodied energy of a building increases by 144% by the time it is 50 years old.
• Refurbishing buildings could reduce Canada’s waste stream by approximately 6%.
• The energy consumption of existing renovated buildings is relatively similar to the energy consumption for a typical new building.

But, action is needed

It is estimated that more than 20% of Canada’s built heritage was lost between 1970 and 2000. (Heritage Research Associates Inc., CIHB Revisited, 1999)

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Heritage conservation and sustainable development are not synonymous movements, but they align where it matters most: in their mutual passion for enhancing the relationships people have with their built environments. Sustainability concerns people and change, and heritage does not dwell on the past but seeks to understand today and the future.

Use the intrinsic-instrumental-institutional framework to develop a well-rounded case for building conservation. Here are some suggestions to help you get started. (Read this short introduction to our recommended approach to making a case.)

Intrinsic

What are people saying about specific buildings and heritage areas?

• Capture comments about the impact and importance of the built environment in your community. Ask people for their most treasured memories (make a contest out of it by awarding a prize for the best story).
• If you have youth outreach programs, ask the young people to draw pictures of buildings they love and ask them to describe why the buildings are important.
• Know the history of the buildings around you and how they helped to create your community. Also, know the success stories of conservation, revitalization, rejuvenation, and reuse. Better yet, get people to describe it for you.
• Consider community surveys that ask people to describe their association with your heritage district. Ask people to vote for their favourite buildings; this will give you a list of buildings that are considered to be important.

Instrumental

Use the proceeding section and the sources to convey irrefutable evidence of the relationship between heritage conservation and environmental sustainability.

Institutional

In this case, you may want to consider how the built environment adds value to your community.

• Consider the social and economic aspects. How does heritage make your community more attractive and liveable? How does heritage support the economy (e.g. affordable housing, sustained housing market, tourism draw). How does the regional district, local government, Chamber of Commerce (and other organizations) use heritage to describe your community as an attractive place to live or visit?

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New South Wales Heritage Branch. “Heritage & Sustainability: A Discussion Paper” January 2004, Pg. 9
Building Resilience: Practical Guidelines For The Sustainable Rehabilitation Of Buildings In Canada (source)
National Trust for Historic Preservation, “ Sustainability by Numbers,” (source)
“U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database.” (2012). National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2012. Accessed November 19, 2012 (source)
Carroon, Jean. 2010. Sustainable Preservation: Greening Existing Buildings.New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.: 7.
Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling: A Literature Review. Dalhousie University Office of Sustainability, 2011
Vancouver Heritage Foundation Green Guide (source)
Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling: A Literature Review. Dalhousie University Office of Sustainability, 2011 (source)