A ban on climate change-causing glass buildings in Toronto unlikely

As the high-rise building spree in downtown Toronto continues unabated (in other areas of the city too, but downtown is the most obvious example), many major architects around the world are calling for new buildings to eschew the now-standard all-glass façade because such buildings are just too hard to cool in our increasingly hot summers.

Certainly in Toronto, that is just not happening - you only have to look at the impenetrable glass wall that surrounds you when you drive through downtown along the Gardiner Expresseay, for example. Those buildings are mainly triple-glazed, to reduce noise as much as to protect against frigid winter temperatures ("solar heat gain", in the industry jargon). That's a lot of glass, and don't expect it to be recycled glass either: it needs to be of the highest quality for such purposes. Some of it may be special laminated glass that darkens in bright sun conditions, much like polarizing sunglasses, to reduce air-conditioning requirements, but such glass is much more expensive and almost impossible to recycle. Bear in mind also, the double- and triple-glazed and laminated glass used in high-rise buildings typically needs to be replaced very 40 years or so.

With all this in mind, and given that around 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions come from the construction, heating, cooling and demolition of buildings, a small, tentative movement against the glass construction Zeitgeist has begun. New York mayor Bill de Blasio shocked the construction industry earlier this year by vowing to ban new glass-only buildings (as well as to make existing buildings more energy efficient), although he later qualified that to a ban on the "excessive" use of glass in buildings, and even that has gone ominously quiet since. There are certainly no signs of that happening in Toronto, though, and am I not aware of any movement in that direction, either now or any time soon.