BusinessWeek recognizes Port Hawkesbury hockey arena
Back in December you may recall a Clean Break feature I wrote on a Nova Scotia-based company called Advanced Glazings, which makes specially glazed windows that are highly insulated and dramatically reduce glare by diffusing direct sunlight. The company’s product was used during the construction of Cape Breton’s Port Hawkesbury hockey arena, which is one of the first in the world to have windows that allow natural light to fill the building. This arena was the focus of my feature. Anyway, three months later BusinessWeek has picked up on this interesting building — and window glazing technology — and has named it one of the world’s Top 10 “World-class sports stadiums,” alongside Cardinals Stadium in Arizona and Berlin Olympic Stadium (the arena is the 7th photo featured). Not bad for a small East Coast town, and certainly tremendous recognition for one of Nova Scotia’s brightest cleantech lights.
On a related note, my article sparked much interest in Advanced Glazings’ technology. In fact, the folks building a new soccer stadium in Toronto, which could end up as an in-door complex, are apparently quite interested in exploring the technology along with other renewable systems, such as installing a geothermal ground-loop system underneath the soccer field that would provide heating and cooling for the stadium and possibly an attached hotel complex. It’s encouraging that people are now seriously and increasingly considering these green approaches at the early design stage.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
