St. Mary’s Hospital praised in the news again!
St. Mary’s Hospital is getting further accolades and recognition! This time, it is heralded as Canada’s greenest hospital, with a note that “it may well be one of the greenest health-care facilities in North America.”
Working with sustainable design
With LEED Gold certification, St. Mary’s Hospital was designed with the goal of becoming North America’s first carbon-neutral hospital. In addition to a high-performance building envelope, the project includes 125 boreholes, each 250 feet deep, which provide a source of zero-carbon energy for heating and cooling the building. It also has a 19-kilowatt solar array that helps meet electricity requirements.
Green principles have been so fully integrated into the hospital’s design that it is set to foster energy savings of 40% – not just in comparison to standard hospital designs, but compared to other facilities that already hold revered LEED Gold status.
Looking forward, compared with the main Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) hospitals and facilities, St Mary’s Hospital expansion project demonstrates great saving potential of 44.5% less energy than the average VCH acute-care facilities, and 25.6% less energy when compared with seven VCH long-term care facilities, and 42.8% from VCH’s total combined 16 core acute- and long-term care facilities.
