(CS5.4) Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit: A Municipal Guide for the adoption of policy in the City of Toronto and across Canada to incentivize adaptive reuse, demolition, deconstruction, material salvage and circularity

The City of Toronto in conjunction with Mantle Developments has undertaken a study, to be published in September of 2024 to create an Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit for Ontario Municipalities. This toolkit will springboard off of their industry leading embodied carbon policy for new construction that has set the first limits in North America on the amount of embodied carbon that can be expended within a development project. Funded by The Atmospheric Fund (TAF), the toolkit will (1) assess the City of Toronto's Urban Design Guidelines for Low-Rise, Mid-Rise and Tall buildings to identify potential drivers of embodied and operational carbon and construction costs; (2) provide recommendations on design, procurement, and material specification processes to prioritize lower carbon materials in construction projects; and (3) provide a review of best practices on demolition and deconstruction and provide recommendations for future amendments to revise the City of Toronto's approach. The intent of this toolkit is to provide a guide that other municipalities can follow to provide consistent adoption of processes across the country.
In the development of demolition and deconstruction recommendations, Mantle Developments is producing a comprehensive report to address circularity requirements and recommendations across the following areas: Adaptive Re-use, Deconstruction and Salvage, Embodied Carbon and Recycling and Landfill Policy.
Mantle is collaborating with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals Advocacy Committee and their Adaptive Re-use, CIimate and Policy Sub-committees to provide guidance on the implementation of a policy decision framework to incentivize the re-use of buildings by quantifying their carbon value and useful life. CAHP is developing the decision tree matrix that will be published within the Embodied Carbon Toolkit and that will require a pre-development audit to be conducted to provide an understanding on whether existing buildings, structures or materials can be retained, refurbished or incorporated into the new development. This will also include decisions about building reuse, renovation and demolition. The goal of this policy is to help municipalities and the development community make better decisions about saving buildings with not just heritage, but also embodied carbon value. This process would also highlight materials that may have value and how deconstruction and salvage can be incorporated into the decision tree matrix and best practices through a pre-demolition audit and carbon impact assessment. This process would seek to identify negative impacts resulting from the loss of embodied carbon to landfill and how they can be mitigated and offset through reclamation, salvage, reuse and recycling.