Will our poles and pipes lead down the road, not out of town?

FOR generations, our essential services have come from afar. In cities, especially, our electricity, gas and water arrive from elsewhere and our waste goes away.

But it won’t necessarily stay that way.

Last month, at the Thriving Neighbourhoods conference held at the Melbourne exhibition centre, post-graduate students and industry types collaborated in a workshop on “decentralised district infrastructure”.

This was the scenario: what if E-Gate – the wedge of land between Docklands and North Melbourne station – was developed as a sustainable precinct? How could it generate electricity, treat wastewater, retain stormwater and deal with rubbish?

Peter Steele, from Moreland Energy Foundation, led the discussion on infrastructure. He says a big shift has already begun.

“At its most basic level, solar panels and water tanks are forms of decentralised infrastructure, and installations are taking off,” he says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

For a large-scale example, Mr Steele points to Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm, Sweden. Its re-development began the late 1990s, when the inner-city land was converted from an industrial shantytown.

“They looked at the infrastructure as a sort of ecology, assessing the inputs and outputs and how they could be reused locally,” he says.

All the heating and cooling for the precinct, which is home to 26,000 people, comes from solar panels and heat extracted from waste treatment. Biogas captured from sewage is used to power local buses, and treated “sludge” is used as a fertiliser.

Mr Steele says we’re lagging behind Europe, but there’s potential to cut carbon emissions quickly and deeply by matching the needs of different buildings: say, heating a pool and powering nearby office blocks.

One way to do that is gas-fired cogeneration or trigeneration – producing heating, cooling and power together. “It makes sense for buildings to share infrastructure that provides their needs more efficiently and with a far lower carbon footprint,” he says.

“A lot of people question whether cogeneration is locking us into another fossil fuel. But it also has the potential to be used with renewables, such as biomass and biofuels.”

Tosh Szatow, from power services business Energy for the People, says much of our established infrastructure is getting old. “It’s time to overhaul it, but gee that’s going to be really expensive. Is there a better way?”

Mr Szatow was a co-author of CSIRO’s Intelligent Grid report, which assessed the prospects for distributed energy in Australia. He says the change will come first to new suburbs and infill developments, such as E-Gate.

“Cost is a big driver for doing it differently. And carbon emissions are part of that cost. Our system is premised on coal and gas being cheap, and it being okay to burn them. Now those premises are questioned we have to find alternatives,” he says.

He’s tipping a future where our low-density suburbs are off the electricity grid (courtesy of solar power and battery storage) and our high-density zones plug into large-scale renewables.

What would the neighbourhood look like? “It could be solar panels on the roofs, battery banks on the streets, local food gardens, and water catchments or waste management wetlands down the road,” he says.

But it won’t just happen – Mr Szatow says householders must demand change from governments and utilities, join community energy groups and install renewables at home. “We don’t have to sit around and wait for change; we can be active in bringing it about.”

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There’s more to recycling than steel cans and glass bottles.

AUTHOR and science journalist Tanya Ha often asks this question:  What do you do in you own home to help the environment?

“Recycling is the first thing people say,” she says. “We’ve been doing it and we’re proud of it. To some degree, it’s second nature.”

National Recycling Week starts tomorrow, coordinated by Planet Ark. There’ll be challenges, swaps and workshops in schools and council areas around the country, and “file flings” in offices to encourage paper recycling.

A recent study released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 98 percent of households recycle or reuse items around home.

That’s something to celebrate, Ms Ha says, but not something to be satisfied with. (Take aluminium cans: we recycle two out of every three; the Germans, 96 out of 100.)

“We’ve gone into autopilot on day-to-day recycling. We could improve, especially away from home, but generally we do it pretty well. But the ground is shifting under us. There’s a lot more we can do,” she says.

To coincide with Recycling Week, Ms Ha and Planet Ark have released a report called Second Nature, which tracks the past and present and speculates on the future of recycling in Australia.

“The waste we produce says so much about our society: what things we buy, what things we value and what we don’t,” she says.

Normal practices are always changing. In the nineteenth century, rag and bone collectors sold household rags to paper mills, and kitchen bones to makers of buttons, soap, glue and gelatine. Until the 1960s, glass drink bottles were all refillable.

Ms Ha says our reasons for recycling have also changed, from concern about sanitation in the eighteenth century, and the need for thrift during the war eras, to worries about landfill capacity in the ’60s and ’70s, when consumption and single-use packaging boomed.

“Now the pressing need is climate change,” she explains, “and the other motivation will be resource security.”

They’re big concerns. Ms Ha says we need a shift in mindset, away from a linear, “cradle-to-grave” approach, and into cyclical, “cradle-to-cradle” thinking.

Organic waste is the perfect illustration. In 2006-07, material such as food scraps, paper, cardboard, wood and garden clippings comprised nearly two-thirds of everything that went into landfill (PDF).

“In landfill conditions, it produces methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. But biodegradable waste is such a useful resource; we need to capture it and put it back into the soil,” she says.

The other challenge is e-waste, such as computers, televisions and batteries. Around Australia, there are 22 million disused mobile phones and accessories languishing in the dark.

Inside are precious resources: 1 tonne of obsolete mobile phones (not including their batteries) can yield 300 grams of gold, over 3 kilograms of silver, about 140 kilograms of copper, among other things.

Until the end of the year, MobileMuster, the industry-funded recycling program, is promoting a “memory muster”. Post or drop-off your old mobile and they’ll send you prints of your six favourite, forgotten photos.

Remember, however, that avoiding consumption is better than recycling the results. Do you really need that new phone, TV or gadget?

With the race on to reduce carbon emissions, Ms Ha says, just worrying about recycling “is like a swimmer just focussing on the tumble turns, not on the laps”.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Building it yourself can help you consume less and live more.

IN 2008, Richard Telford bought a small block of land in Seymour, an hour north of Melbourne.

He dismantled the run-down weatherboard bungalow, and carefully stored the materials for reuse. Over the course of a year, the former white-collar worker laboured full-time to build a new home for his young family.

This year, Abdallah House – named for its street – was a finalist in the Housing Industry Association’s GreenSmart Awards.

The 100–square metre, three-bedroom home is largely self-reliant in water and energy. With two toddlers, he and his partner Kunie Yoshimoto use about one-eighth the electricity of an average home.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“People have become detached from where and how they live,” Mr Telford says. “The owner-building process really connected us with what’s involved in a house – the effort to create it and the energy and water we consume. It’s like growing your own food: the more involved you are, the greater appreciation you have for the quality.”

It also gave him control over the way materials were used and re-used.

“In a typical house, several skips go to landfill. We threw almost nothing away. We used things that would be considered waste, and transformed them into something quite beautiful,” he says.

He didn’t do it alone. Mr Telford teamed up with Peter Lockyer, an architect and builder who makes a living helping owner-builders with the nuts and bolts of designing and constructing a dwelling.

The main environmental benefit of doing it yourself, Mr Lockyer says, comes down to size. “Their homes tend to be smaller. You assess your needs more clearly – you don’t build a separate theatre or extra living rooms you’ll never use.”

Over three decades, he’s worked on about 100 passive solar homes of this kind. He remains enthralled by the creativity that emerges when people, with no special skills or experience, work slowly and steadily on something they care about.

“I’m still excited by the hands-on process of people creating their own space,” he says. “Building can be fun. It’s an enriching part of life, not just a transaction to get a product. They’re creating more than a backdrop for a plasma screen.”

He offers a warning too: projects are more likely to take years than months, and that can be stressful for relationships. Also, many banks are cautious in offering loans to owner-builders.

His advice is to make sure you’ve got someone on your side – a registered builder – who can help you avoid the bumps. The Building Commission provides links to tips, training and a useful information kit (PDF), which details your obligations and the required applications.

For Mr Telford, becoming an owner-builder was about choosing a way of life. The land cost $54,000 and the budget for the new house was just $100,000. With the help of the generous government grants then available, the couple have already paid off their mortgage. They have an abundant food garden, very few costs, and a lot of freedom to decide how they’ll spend their time.

Before all this, Mr Telford worked in advertising. Now, he does his own publishing, including a permaculture calendar, and writes about Abdallah House on his blog. “I’m using those skills to promote things I believe in,” he explains.

“I wanted to show people that you can do it without getting in debt for the rest of your life.”

Read this article at The Age online