Resource Library

The City of Vancouver wants to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. In order to do so the Engineering Division needs to find a way to recycle or repurpose all of their road and utility construction waste. There is approximately 100,000 tonnes of construction waste that is not recycled each year. This project addresses this issue by exploring ways to improve current operations to increase recycling as well as investigating future opportunities for recycling the construction waste. 

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: zero waste, green buildings, waste management & recycling

The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) currently generates approximately 7000 kg of police uniform waste annually. This report explores available methods for disposing of decommissioned uniforms and evaluates them for security, environmental impact, and cost-effectiveness. The project promotes the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan zero waste goals, and advances the VPD’s Code Green initiatives.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: lighter footprint, sustainable development & green economy, waste management & recycling

The City of Vancouver (City) has put forth ambitious goals to reduce community and operations based carbon emissions through the introduction of a Greenest City Action Plan (GCAP). In order to achieve these goals in the City’s operations, the City of Vancouver has turned to renewable fuels, and recently biodiesel and renewable diesel have garnered specific interest. Currently within the 3.8 million liters of diesel fuel used by the municipal fleet, 5.8% represents bio-derived content from the use of B5 and B20 blends of biodiesel. However, in order to increase fuel emission savings, a transition needs to be made to higher blends of renewable fuels. This report summarizes an investigation into the use of higher blends of biodiesel and renewable diesel in the Vancouver municipal fleet.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: lighter footprint, transportation

This report consists of a review of international best practices in transit fare policies from cities around the world based on academic literature, publicly available transit agency information, and interviews with transit agency stakeholders. The report identifies opportunities and challenges for the Metro Vancouver Region in the following areas: distance and zone based pricing, time of day pricing, differentiation by service type, concession fares, and approaches to policy changes. Lessons are drawn from each case study with a view to informing the City of Vancouver’s ongoing participation in TransLink’s Fare Review process.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: green transportation

This report contains design guidelines for Class B urban farms on City of Vancouver-owned land. These guidelines were produced for the Department of Social Planning and the City of Vancouver as an initiative of the Greenest City Scholar Program. It is a living document capable of being updated and edited to fit the needs of both urban farmers and the City of Vancouver.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: lighter footprint, food systems, sustainable development & green economy

The purpose of this project was to provide recommendations on how the City of Vancouver can assist SRO and subsidized housing buildings to divert their waste. The report includes research to identify barriers and issues that impede implementation of zero waste strategies, research on measures that have been or are being implemented by other jurisdictions, an estimate of the amount of solid waste generated from SRO and subsidized housing within the City.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: zero waste, waste management & recycling

This report discusses research conducted during the summer of 2016 on the potential value of establishing a 2030 District in BC. Information was extracted from interviews with participants and leaders from other Districts and staff from the coordinating non-profit Architecture 2030, as well as from a literature review. Findings indicate that a 2030 District in BC could realize a number of key benefits.

Partner: BC Ministry of Energy and Mines & City of Richmond
Keywords: green buildings, leadership & behaviour change, sustainable development & green economy

This report provides an overview of thermographic technology and its applications in evaluating building energy efficiency.  By reviewing this report, it is expected that readers will be informed of both the benefits and the challenges of using thermal cameras to survey energy efficiency, and will be better equipped for evaluating the feasibility of incorporating this technology in municipal programs. 

Partner: City of Surrey
Keywords: green buildings, sustainable development & green economy

Compared to other intensively managed and diversified farms, the UBC Farm is a highly integrated farm system. This allows the farm to manipulate a wholly contained food system that ranges from food production to processing and consumption across an agricultural and forested landscape. The purpose of this project was to help clarify the farm system components and relationships between them. This involved developing a concept map of the farm system then building a data index and and an evaluation sheet using the framework.

Partner: Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm
Keywords: ecological systems, food systems