CIRS and Water

The goals of the CIRS building are based on what we call the new sustainability agenda. The old agenda, on this view, is about being less bad by reducing negative impacts (emissions, waste, habitat loss, human health, job loss, etc.). The new sustainability agenda is about creating good by being regenerative (sometimes called net positive). Thus, by adding CIRS to the UBC campus, we will reduce UBC’s overall energy use and carbon emissions, sequester more carbon in the structure of CIRS than is emitted during its construction and eventual decommissioning, and improve the quality of the water flowing through the CIRS site.

To accomplish this net positive water quality goal, we will first run the whole CIRS building on rainwater, harvested on the roof of the building. Then we will treat the water before consuming it (since rainwater is not potable), and treat it several more times as it makes it way down the chain from potable water to grey water to black water and eventually is discharged from the building, at a higher quality than the original rainwater. To accomplish all this requires a significant amount of water treatment processes on site, and one question this raises is what the right scale is for different kinds of water treatment (See http://watercanada.net/2010/going-solo/ for a fuller description of the CIRS system and the issues of decentralized water systems). Is full treatment at the building scale the best answer, or should we think instead of distributed treatment plants at the scale of groups of buildings or neighbourhoods? This will be a big question for us as we begin to treat the whole UBC campus as single integrated system. How best should we deal with water use, sourcing, distribution, and treatment in buildings and on the campus?