Sustainability

 
The City of Markham is one of Canada’s fastest growing municipalities and is highly regarded for its environmental leadership, which is it why it selected Downtown Markham as the centrepiece and urban innovation lab for its green building initiatives. As a member of the Markham Centre Advisory Committee, The Remington Group works closely with the municipality and partners in this re-imagined Downtown core (and in other on key areas of Markham) to develop standards for infrastructure to support the concentration of activity within an emerging City centre, ensuring the master plan and its implementation provide an overall benefit to the quality of life and surrounding residents, including the on-going protection and enhancement of the Rouge River and other natural features of the site amidst continuing development.

The Remington Group understands that green commercial developments offer employees and customers alike better working and living conditions, which is why all spaces are built to LEED Silver or higher. At full build out, Downtown Markham will become North America's largest collection of LEED certified buildings. Aside from the tight integration of transit and natural space, each High Rise residence and office space is equipped in ways that encourage community members to live greener lifestyles. From ample bicycle parking and trails, preferred parking spaces for carpool and green vehicles, electric vehicle charging stations, and a delicate but well-planned network of pedestrian pathways connecting Downtown Markham’s hubs, this finely-tuned master-plan facilitates flowing mobility of its residents and creates a functional and attractive ground-level urban realm that will limit dependence on automobiles.

The Remington Group has been a long-standing supporter of district energy, weaving it into the fabric of all 243 acres of Downtown Markham and reducing community emissions by 50%. Development of Downtown Markham’s dynamic mixed-use blocks has been sequenced to correspond to the availability and capacity of steadily developing local infrastructure, but also out of consideration for due process in evaluating protective measures for surrounding wildlife.

 
District energy is a system of highly insulated underground thermal piping networks that transmit hot and chilled water from central plants to heat and cool buildings, most often schools or corporate campuses. Markham District Energy established its flagship system, the Birchmount Energy Centre, on the western border of our growing Downtown.

The Remington Group inventively installed a second MDE plant in the basement of the community’s heritage site, the Alexander Bradburn Farmhouse (pictured right), restored and converted into mixed-use space in the community’s first park. Together these plants produce energy services for more than 4 million sq. ft. of building connections and generate 3MW of power for the local grid; sufficient power for 3,000 homes in Markham today. This system is expected to grow to serve 40 million sq. ft. of building connections and power more than 40,000 residents and 40,000 employees. District energy helps building operators and residents, with precise control over their heating and cooling - right down to in-suite thermal monitoring in every condominium unit. Because thermal energy is delivered directly to each building in usable form, our residents, tenants and commercial partners avoid installing expensive equipment like boilers, chillers and cooling towers that take up valuable space and incur costs for operation and maintenance.

Another critical advantage of Downtown Markham is the vast scale of its master plan. When a district energy network interconnects multiple buildings, it collects a diverse range of heating and cooling profiles, achieving economies of scale that enable deployment of more efficient and resilient local energy resources. The size of this ever-evolving master plan enables integration of cleaner options, offers unmatched reliability and resiliency of services in increasingly unreliable times, and significantly cuts carbon emissions at a rate unachievable in other urban centres operated on a building by building basis.