Benchmarking of water consumption and waste management in multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) in Toronto

Abstract

Water and solid waste benchmarking and developing meaningful performance indicators can help government and building owners to make effective decisions on improving their buildings’ efficiency and sustainability. For this study, information on 120 multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) has been collected and analyzed. The study entails the following steps: performing water and solid waste benchmarking for the 120 MURBs, developing meaningful performance indicators; determining performance ranking; and estimating different levels of savings (water, solid waste, cost, and GHG emissions). The most appropriate performance indicator and the benchmarking range for water and solid waste are as follows: water consumption normalized by square metre, 1.06–4.19 m3/m2; solid waste benchmarking normalized by number of units, 1.58–17.4 yd3/unit. Also, the MURBs domestic hot water system efficiencies are found to be very low (with overall system efficiency in the range of 35% to 45%). A relatively strong correlation is found between annual natural gas consumption and annual water consumption.