How Our Move to Oakville This Summer Has Helped Us to Make a Personal Climate Impact

In moving this summer from Toronto to Oakville a mere 50 kilometres (31 miles) west of the city, my wife and I have accomplished a more significant carbon footprint reduction than anything else we have done to date.

Why is that? We downsized and decluttered. The building we chose to live in is environmentally far greener than where we lived before. Documenting what has changed is an interesting exercise.

1. Our last apartment was in an older condominium. It was a concrete building with double pane windows that were reaching their end of life. They leaked both heat and cold to the outside. So in moving to a new Oakville apartment with energy-efficient windows and doors, we have stopped heating and cooling the outside needlessly.
2. Our last apartment faced northwest. In the summer our west-facing rooms boiled. In the winter they froze. Maintaining a comfortable internal environment required cranking the air conditioning in the summer and supplementary block heating in the winter. In contrast, the Oakville apartment faces south and although we have yet to face a winter, the full sun exposure will make it much easier to keep the apartment warm without resorting to raising the thermostat. We have found the summer heat easy to manage using the blind window coverings that let in light but not heat and have minimized the use of air conditioning to no more than a few morning hours.
3. Our Toronto apartment used natural gas for heating, cooling and hot water. It was a centralized system that shut down heat or air conditioning to all units based on calendar dates rather than weather conditions. That left many days when the apartment was too hot or too cold. It also meant using supplementary block heaters when the building’s air conditioning didn’t match the weather conditions outside. In contrast, our Oakville apartment uses heat pumps. Each apartment has its own which allows us to control the thermostat. And because we face south, the passive heating should mean minimal heat pump use to warm the place.
4. When we started looking for a new place to live we chose a greener building. How so? The concrete used in the building sequestered carbon within it. The roof is green. Contrast the above with our twenty-year-old Toronto apartment built using carbon-intensive Portland cement and no green roof.
5. Our midtown Toronto apartment did give us walkable access to mass transit. We had a restaurant across the street. But, surprisingly, we found ourselves using our car to get around far more than we wanted to considering we had moved from the suburbs to shed one car and use the remaining one far less. In Oakville, we have found ourselves in an accessible neighbourhood with a pharmacy and grocery store right next door, a restaurant in the building and a half-dozen nearby to walk to.
6. As previously stated, I thought moving to midtown Toronto would take us out of the car and make its need redundant. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, changed all that. We stopped using public transit for health reasons. The move to Oakville has us using the car less than we did in Toronto. In our last three commutes back to the city, two of them have been using the regional rail system called GO. A short car commute takes us to the station where parking is free. The GO takes us to downtown Toronto where we hop on the subway to move about the city. There is a train every 30 minutes.
7. Another thing about living in the midtown of a large city is pollution. The two biggies are air and noise. The biggest contributors to air pollution are the buildings and motor vehicles that produce greenhouse gasses and particulate matter. The air may seem clean and clear but the amount of grit that lands on balconies and comes into apartments through windows and doors is noticeable. And then there is the noise from traffic, city maintenance, and new construction. Even on nice blue sky days it often meant shutting our windows. The contrast is immediately evident here in Oakville. Our apartment overlooks Lake Ontario and not high volumes of traffic. The air is far cleaner. And the psychological benefit of a calming lake cannot be underestimated.

So how can one quantify the net carbon benefit of our move? Back in 2018, I posted a series of articles on this site entitled, How Canadians Can Lower Their Carbon Footprint and Show The World How It Can Be Done. Part 3 introduced a carbon calculator of my design. When I add up the score from before and now the change is dramatic. We’ve cut our carbon emissions contribution almost in half which if we could all do this in energy-rich countries like Canada, would help to mitigate global warming.