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Institutional facilities embody the physical infrastructure of the communities they house. Aging institutional buildings, especially those within extensive central campuses, cannot easily be disposed of or abandoned in favour of new facilities. Demolition followed by reconstruction is one alternative, however, this is highly disruptive and often these buildings are historically designated or their replacement value cannot be afforded.
This paper examines the application of the CBIP Screening Tool software to help assess the issues, alternatives and strategies for sustaining institutional facilities within the context of an established campus at the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest public university. The St. George campus of the University of Toronto is located on a 65-hectare site in the heart of the city and serves an academic community of some 8,000 faculty and staff, and more than 43,000 full and part-time students. Approximately 150 buildings comprise over 1 million square metres of occupied space, ranging in age from 145 years to the present, with a mean age of 75 years. Decades of government under-funding to the educational sectors in the province of Ontario have resulted in the neglect of proper maintenance, repair and replacement of building fabrics and equipment. As a result, an overwhelming backlog of deferred maintenance continues to financially burden the academic community, both in terms of maintenance and operating budgets. Further, this stock of buildings, which exhibits high non-renewable energy consumption patterns, continues to impair national goals to achieve greenhouse gas reductions under the Kyoto Accord.
Research undertaken to identify sustainable future scenarios for the management of institutional facilities focuses on prudent investments in energy conservation measures integrated within necessary expenditures aimed at addressing a deferred maintenance deficit. The CBIP Screening Tool software developed by Natural Resources Canada was employed on a fleet averaged model and the results fed into a life cycle cost analysis to assess the cost effectiveness of various energy conservation strategies that also contribute to the restoration and improved durability of fabrics and equipment. Results presented in this paper indicate that while it is not possible in the short term to improve the energy efficiency of existing institutional facilities to a level approaching that of new buildings, significant improvements can be realized in the medium to long term, such that their economic and environmental viability can be sustained without compromising present needs