The project is being called Canada’s Greenest Home, which sets the bar pretty high, but the努力中心, a nonprofit building school in Peterborough, Ontario, decided the time is right.

Endeavour encourages its students to engage their minds and “get their hands dirty” on ambitious projects, including this 2,000-sq.-ft. two-story home, which is designed for an infill lot in Peterborough and will be the focus of the school’s five-month Sustainable New Construction certificate program.

“我们花了很长时间考虑了我们提出的主张：加拿大最绿色的房屋。我们研究了该国建造的许多房屋，以降低环境影响。”博客页面，指出其调查发现了能源效率，土地利用，回收，当地采购，水和材料保护以及乘员普遍可访问性的出色例子。然而，努力指导员补充说：“我们没有发现的是试图做所有这些事情的家。我们认为，这样做的房屋确实是加拿大最绿色的家。”

全力以赴

So Endeavour Centre decided to design and build its Greenest Home project to a standard that its instructors felt would address environmental, ecological, and performance issues as comprehensively and rigorously as possible: the Living Building Challenge, whose建筑认证计划includes 20 requirements — which LBC calls “imperatives” — and a 12-month performance evaluation.

LBC确定了每个新建筑项目必须解决的七个“花瓣”或优先事项。Four of LBC’s 20 imperatives, for example, fall under the “site” petal: limits to growth, car-free living, urban agriculture (a portion of the lot, based on the square footage of the building and its setting, must be dedicated to agriculture), and habitat exchange (which requires that for each parcel of land developed, a parcel of equal size is set aside in perpetuity).

UnderLBC要求, the Greenest Home will be expected to tightly manage its water use — it will have a rainwater collection system and gray water recycling — and to compost human waste, in this case via foam flush toilets. As GBA contributor Carl Seville pointed out in2011年8月关于LBC的帖子, projects can also draw water from on-site wells, although LBC allows hookups to municipal water in jurisdictions that require it.

The first of many?

该房子的设计可容纳轮椅，楼下设有一个完整的浴室和卧室。LBC认证还要求建筑物以零净能源运行。最绿色的房屋的外墙将包括将在本地预制的草皮墙板，该建筑物将配备光伏和太阳能热水系统。

Chris Magwood, a founding director of Endeavour Centre, told GBA that the building’s crawlspace walls will be insulated to R-20, although the main floor will be isolated from the crawlspace with R-60 insulation in the floor joists. The exterior walls will be R-35 where the straw-bale panels are used and R-40 where the construction team will use double-stud framing. The roof will be insulated to R-70 with blown-in cellulose.

基金会将是双方的Earthbag，并在吉特斯之间带有Roxul绝缘。整个过程都将使用玻璃纤维，三层玻璃内联窗。

One completed, the house will be sold to help Endeavour Centre cover tuition costs. Magwood says that the construction budget for the project is about $212,500. The center’s instructors add that they hope that home’s performance and possible LBC certification will inspire Endeavour graduates and other builders to surpass the LBC standard in future projects.

Magwood noted that the Endeavor team will take a while to estimate costs for project monitoring and other verification procedures tied to LBC certification. “I honestly don’t know!” he wrote in an email to GBA. “Because we’re an educational institute, we can have faculty and students work on aspects of the certification and not have to directly pay for them. We’ll be monitoring the time involved in the certification this time around so we’ll have some sense of this figure for future projects.”