What is ZEROlab™?

The ZEROlab™ mission is to provide facilities where researchers in science, engineering, architecture, business, and politics have the collaboration tools needed to understand and create sustainable buildings and cities. ZEROlabs™ will be located in key universities in order to create a network for carbon reduction information exchange and open source software development.

The Challenge

The labs respond to a great challenge facing our nations—the threat of global climate change. Building and maintaining our cities produces the majority of the carbon dioxide driving climate change. Surprisingly, unlike cars that require fuel-efficiency ratings, the energy efficiency of our buildings and cities is unknown. For example, SUV’s create approximately 3% of North America’s CO2. Cities produce more than 50%, but we know more about automobile efficiency than we do about the major cause of our environmental footprint—the built environment.

How it Works

The ZEROlab™ will work to make building carbon efficiency visible and measurable.
ZEROlab™ students and researchers will engage in a structured process of experimentation to create new tools of carbon measurement and analysis. All their activities will be open-sourced to the lab community, a strategy intended to accelerate the network benefits of their collective research.

Read the letter of support for this initiative from the Ontario Centres of Excellence Inc. (OCE) 

Click on PDF for more information or contact Zerofootprint at (416) 365-7557 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)