The City of Toronto has been collaborating with consultants Mantle Developments and Ha/f Climate Design through a TAF-funded study to develop an embodied carbon toolkit for municipal governments and construction projects.

The toolkit presents recommendations to manage embodied carbon over three key topics:

1. Construction circularity: reuse of existing structures and materials to minimize embodied carbon while reducing waste and minimizing resource consumption.

2. Urban design: design new buildings in the most carbon-efficient ways and avoid unintended consequences associated with high-carbon design features like transfer structures and setbacks.

3. Procurement of low-carbon materials: request low-carbon materials and construction processes in building and infrastructure design and construction.

The toolkit recommendations were developed in cooperation with working groups consisting of dozens of City of Toronto staff across various departments, through extensive LCA modelling, included research into current approaches and best practices, and were tested by working with a number of pilot projects.