Climate Crisis Requires Sustainable Building Materials

The world produces approximately 50 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions every year, equal to 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers. Roughly 40% of these emissions directly result from the building and construction industry. Mitrex's sustainable building materials offset emissions with BIPV technology.

Factoring this information with the point that every week, the number of buildings constructed equals the city of Paris, it’s clear that there’s a heightened carbon embodiment issue. This is because the extraction, transportation, manufacturing, and installation of traditional building materials, such as concrete, utilize a lot of carbon. Not to mention that the carbon footprint of construction is often more than the emissions produced during the lifespan of a building.

Utilizing sustainable building materials instead of harmful, non-green energy would help reduce building owners’ contribution to climate change.

Solar Technology & Sustainable Building Materials

Solar technology is typically only attached to structures through rooftop solar panel installations. This typically lacks beauty and taste as constructors do not have creative control over the overall design. Factors such as size and shape limit other applications of solar panels. Therefore, it is challenging for solar to be mass-adopted.

In contrast to this common concern, Mitrex, a Toronto-based manufacturer, offers building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). These sustainable building materials include aesthetically pleasing solar cladding, glass, roof, and more to make adoption of solar energy easy. The solar cladding technology utilizes a customizable facing layer that produces panels in a limitless range of colours and patterns. This is mounted overtop solar cells, providing a beautiful, energy-generating building envelope.

This technology encourages the adoption of sustainable solar energy, contributing to a carbon-neutral future—contrary to traditional, highly-carbonated building materials. Conventional building materials contribute to the growing climate crisis through various means such as extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and installation.

Mitrex Building Integrated Photovoltaics

The fully automated Mitrex facility can produce tens of thousands of square feet of integrated solar materials each day, ensuring constructors are provided with an accessible and limitless range of solar materials to utilize creatively. The solar cladding features lightweight efficiency coupled with structural strength similar to concrete, without contributing to carbon emissions—unlike traditional materials.

Once Mitrex produces the cladding material, they rapidly deliver the product to construction sites, where they install cladding material with minimal disturbance on the job site. Façade materials can be integrated onto new and retrofitted infrastructure to generate solar energy.

Through these sustainable efforts, Mitrex has largely been successful in minimizing carbon emissions. Mitrex’s mission of reversing the emissions of greenhouse gases in the face of the current climate crisis has come to fruition through advanced solar technology and lightweight, durable materials. This technology also largely contributes to the depreciation of a high carbon power grid, unlike most traditional building materials.

Mitrex technology is rapidly leading the future of building development in a sustainable direction. Several structures have already adopted this technology. Around the world, from Canada to the Middle East, structures plan to incorporate Mitrex solar technology, reinventing our global use of energy in an eco-friendly and sustainable manner. We hope this inspires many other countries to do the same.