Articles – Page 37

Carbon tax and households

In Greener Homes on July 31, 2011

Simple steps at home will offset the cost of the carbon tax

AS a householder, there’s one key feature of the federal government’s carbon tax that you mustn’t overlook: you can avoid paying it.

And that’s what you’re meant to do. Ian Porter, CEO of the Alternative Technology Association, observes that the tax is intended to encourage households and businesses to use less energy, and therefore, produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

“Anyone who is energy-wise is likely to experience very little impact at all,” he says.

The government predicts a price rise of about $10 per week for an average household (offset by the average compensation, which is just over $10 per week). Of that amount, the electricity portion comprises $3.30 per week.

But these numbers are based on average usage. They don’t take into account the way we can change our habits. You can offset the rising prices by becoming more energy efficient around the home.

“The normal rule of thumb is that around 10 per cent – if not more – of your energy bill can be reduced by simple, cheap or free measures, such as avoiding standby power, switching lights off and installing draught excluders under your doors to keep your rooms warmer,” Mr Porter says.

So for a savvy householder, the deal is good news: you can reduce your energy consumption and carbon emissions, avoid the tax and pocket the compensation.

Damian Sullivan, from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, agrees that we shouldn’t worry that the tax will cause a big jump in our cost of living. The charity operates a social enterprise, Brotherhood Green, which conducts energy audits and retrofits of existing homes for low-income earners.

“Electricity prices are already rising dramatically, with or without a carbon price,” he says. “The compensation will cover the added impact, but the scheme also provides an incentive for people to implement energy efficiency around their homes.”

As part of the plan, the government has promised to set up a national energy savings initiative, which would oblige energy retailers to help customers to reduce their electricity demand.

“There are a whole lot of measures you can take, from everyday actions and home maintenance, to purchasing efficient appliances when you need new ones,” he says.

Mr Sullivan says it pays to regularly re-assess your habits. The dollars quickly add up, with even the most innocuous changes in household behaviour. By washing your clothes in cold water, avoiding using a dryer, sealing draughts and installing an efficient showerhead, the savings for a family of four could total over $300 per year, he says.

For his part, Mr Porter looks coolly upon the custom of running a second fridge. “So often when we replace a refrigerator, we keep the old one. People like to leave it in their garage and store beer in it, but it’s an energy guzzler if you do that,” he says. “Consider the type and the number of appliances you choose to have.”

If the opportunity arises, you can hardwire cheaper bills and fewer greenhouse gas emissions by designing and building as efficiently as you can.

“If you’re lucky enough to be at the point where you’re designing, buying or renovating a house, that’s when passive solar design comes to the fore – initiatives such as orientation, glazing and thermal mass,” Mr Porter says. “That’s where you’ll make some of your biggest savings.”

Read this article at The Age online

Building bench seats

In Blog on July 29, 2011

THE Urban Bush-Carpenters’ workshop at CERES last month was on how to build bench seats. It was, needless to say, a tremendous success. We used pallets and bits and bobs collected hither and thither.

None of us had made a bench for a while, but Geoff dusted off our old design template for the legs and set about explaining the task at hand.

Our approach is quite simple – criss-crossed pieces, screwed and reinforced – but the trick is in getting the angles correct. This can take some trial and error to begin with. If you try, remember to make sure the seat is a nice height and depth, and the backrest is on a comfortable slant. Play around with the timber until it works. If in doubt, find a bench seat and copy its design.

Kavi, Thierry and Andy were hard at work, while Phil and Leharna streaked ahead of the rest.

And here are the three finished benches, together with their builders. As you can see, each bench – and each human – turned out different and beautiful, in their own way.

We’re planning on using the benches for some chair bombing. In the coming weeks, we’ll be setting them down on a nice piece of nature strip, some place where neighbours and passers-by can sit and shoot the breeze.

Next month’s workshop, on August 20, will be on making planter boxes from pallets. It’s filling fast, so contact the UBC if you’re keen.

Q&A with Carolyn Steel

In Architecture and building, Environment on July 24, 2011

A few weeks ago I interviewed writer and architect Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City: How food shapes our lives, who visited Melbourne last week for the State of Design Festival.

Soon, I’ll publish a Greener Homes column in The Sunday Age based in part on our conversation, but here’s a longer, edited version of the interview. We chatted for so long, we even spoke about Masterchef. Carolyn loves it and loathes it. Read on to find out why…

Why do we need to think about cities and food?

In trying to describe a city through food, I’ve come to the conclusion that food – which is the most important thing in all our lives – has been sidelined, culturally, politically, economically and mentally. We’ve constructed this bizarre idea that food should be cheap and convenient, which it clearly isn’t and shouldn’t be. We’ve lost our sense of the true value of food basically. We externalise all its true costs.

It’s also the case that about a billion people globally don’t have access to food. They’re hungry. But actually a large proportion of that is directly attributable to the globalised industrial food system. Demonstrably there’s more food available globally at the moment than we need, but it’s not reaching everybody.

Because I’m an architect, I’m interested in how those iniquities of the food system relate to cities. I talk about what I call the urban paradox, which is essentially that as humans we have two key needs: sociability (each other) and sustenance (all the natural resources necessary to sustain us, of which food is a key element). The urban paradox comes from the fact that if we live together in large blobs in order to be sociable, if we gather in cities, then we get further and further away from the sources of our sustenance and there’s no solution to this.

What’s the role of architecture and design in responding to this problem?

Is it right that we design houses that don’t have a kitchen, as we now do in the UK? Because, basically, people aren’t cooking, so don’t bother to get them a kitchen. That’s a design issue. If you start saying food is important, you start asking: How do we design the food system so that it is equitable? How do we design the whole journey of food, from the producer to the consumer?

In the case of the pre-industrial world, the countryside was basically a short little chain where you had multipurpose farms and people living nearby and you walked and got it. Now we have these global systems. That’s a design problem because frankly the way we’ve got it set up at the moment has been designed by people who are not designers of society, they’re designers of food systems. I’m saying we have to bring the question of how food travels, how food is produced, how it is bought and sold, directly into the architectural and urban design frame.

People talk about eco-cities and they go on about the u-values and saving water, but the food comes from the supermarket. That’s not an eco-city. If you want to design an eco-city, food is central to it. We have to eat every day – where’s it coming from? Food and agriculture, together, account for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions currently, so if you’re talking about the environment, you have to be talking about food.

I’m not saying that cities should grow all of their own food inside the city, because that is the definition of the countryside. But what is that balance? There are so many models that begin to address how you get a balance between urbanity and rurality.

What model are we using now, and what alternatives are there?

At one end of the possibilities is that we all move to Shanghai and we make Brazil the farm. Behind the global industrial food system model is the logic that you live in urban blobs of up to 30 million people and the farm is thousands of miles away and it uses mono-cultural production.

At the other end, we all go back to being farmers, which is what Frank Lloyd Wright was suggesting with his Broadacre City concept. He said we’ve got to stop building cities altogether, we’ve got to cover the whole of America in little farmsteads and everybody has got to go back to growing their own food.

I’m very interested in solutions that somehow look at the middle ground. In Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model, people would live in urban blobs of up to 30,000 people, with productive farmland around and then a network created with railways, and that gives you the urbanity.

So what kinds of things can people do to make change?

There’s a series of things that can be done at all levels. If you live in suburbia, grow your own. When you think about it, low-density suburbia is fertile land that has just had houses built on it. So there’s capacity for people to do fairly serious home food production in their gardens, which they probably don’t use anyway.

If you have a compact urban core, with farmland nearby then you can create networks that allow producers and consumers to come together. This is the Slow Food ‘co-producer’ idea. Carlo Petrini talks about consumers becoming co-producers. You become aware of food and where it’s been produced, and through your choices you actively promote ethical, local, seasonal good food.

If you go to one supermarket and get all your food from there, it’s got an unacceptable level of control over your life. In the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the packaged and processed food is, it’s very likely that unless it says explicitly on the label that it is sustainably and ethically sourced, that it isn’t. Once you start to understand that the food you’re buying is not good, you actually start looking for other sources.

There are many models for how can we get together and use our buying power to create alternative, better food networks. In the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn every member works a four-hour shift every month. And so the people own the supermarket. Now it’s got 14,000 members and it’s been going for 38 years.

It’s a model that’s now being copied in London by The People’s Supermarket. These are the models that hopefully will start to scale up. But it is about people getting interested in food – not just what is in the food, but the social and political implications of the way we eat food, and becoming proactive about changing it.

If you’re operating at the global scale, which all cities do, then you begin to use your city-wide power to question the international food system and the political and economic frameworks that allow it to have such free reign.

Toronto has a food policy council, which means that any law that is passed in Toronto it has to go through the food policy council first and the implications for the food system are addressed before that legislation is passed.

Masterchef has been hugely popular in Australia, but a supermarket sponsors it. Can these kinds of shows help change the food culture?

I’m a Masterchef addict – I’ve watched every episode that’s ever been broadcast. I always call programs like Masterchef ‘food porn’, because people go to the supermarket, buy the cheapest possible, hideous ready-meal and then they sit in front of these programs eating crap and watching somebody cooking incredible food.

I’m afraid the more cookery programs are on television, the more it’s a sign there’s something wrong in the food culture. There’s a complete disjunction. If you go to countries like France or Italy, where there’s still a reasonable cooking culture, people don’t sit and watch chefs on television because why on earth would you do that? They just do it themselves. It’s a symptom of the problem, really. I do still love the program, but I also cook.

Repair

In Greener Homes on July 24, 2011

Repairing old things creates something new

A few years ago, Scott Mitchell began accepting busted iPods from all-comers, offering to open them up and tinker with their bits. He dubbed the experiment the iPod Social Outreach Project.

“I fixed over half of them without access to any spare parts, just by taking them apart, cleaning them, seeing if the connections were still ok,” he says. “At the start I had no experience – and that was the point.”

Mr Mitchell is one of the expert fixers involved in The Repair Workshops, which are open to the public on July 30 and 31, as part of the State of Design Festival.

Coordinated by design consultancy Eco Innovators and jewellery-repair project The Treasury, the event comprises two parts. First, a group of artists and technicians will create new artworks from broken items that had been donated to charities; and second, the team of fixers will repair or repurpose goods brought in by the public. (Numbers are limited, so you must pre-register on the website to be involved.)

For his PhD research, Mr Mitchell has studied the way people modify mass-produced goods. Over the last decade, he says, products have become increasingly sealed up and un-repairable – designed for the dump, not for longevity.

“But because of this restriction in consumer access, there’s been a parallel movement to reclaim those rights,” he says.

One example is The Repair Manifesto, which was one of the inspirations for the upcoming workshops. Conceived by Dutch collective Platform 21, the manifesto’s tagline is “Stop Recycling. Start Repairing.”

“The idea is that we’ll save a lot more energy and consumer waste if products are designed for repair before recycling,” Mr Mitchell says. “The manifesto contends that repair is a productive and positive way to engage with the world – and it’s a lot of fun.”

Wil Campbell, an industrial designer and another of the collaborators in The Repair Workshops, agrees. He says the need to save virgin resources will only grow more pressing as oil becomes more scarce and expensive.

“Each product existed as resources before it was turned into a product and, in most cases, it’s going to continue to exist for many thousands of years after you’ve finished with it. It’s good to make the brief window of usefulness as long as possible.”

And you don’t need to be an engineer to try; mending household items is well within reach of the average person.

“You can go online and find out how to fix almost anything – so many people are willing to give it a go and post instructions on forums, or videos on YouTube and websites like ifixit.com. You can skill yourself up on a situation by situation basis,” he says.

Mr Campbell argues there’s a deeper benefit to the practice. The beauty of repair, he says, is that it not only saves money and resources, but also shifts the way we think about products, the way they work and the effort involved in their creation.

“Repairing forces people to engage with the stuff of their life. When you fix something, you develop a relationship with it,” he says. “It gives you a story to tell. People like telling stories about products – about the way they use their grandmother’s old cookware – and it’s that type of thing that is so rewarding.”

Read this article at The Age online

Sourdough starter

In Blog on July 13, 2011

I’M besotted with baking at the moment, so over the coming weeks, I’ll write a couple of posts about my sourdough and me.

Today, I’ll start – where else? – with the starter. If you’d like a soundtrack, I suggest The Loaf, by Darren Hanlon.

For those of you who haven’t come across the makings of sourdough before, the starter – otherwise known as the culture, plant or mother dough – is a kind of wild, bubbling, gurgling yeast. It’s the thing that makes the dough rise and contains the bacteria that make it sour. To my understanding of yeast, what happens is this: as the mix ferments, the yeast eats the sugars in the flour and releases carbon dioxide, which leavens the dough.

You can make your own starter in a week, by fermenting flour and water. I have a beautiful book called The Handmade Loaf, by Dan Lepard, in which he suggests adding raisins and yoghurt to the recipe.

But if you’ve got a liking for narrative – or convenience – I suggest you prevail on a friend for a portion of their culture. To keep it alive, you must feed it regularly with fresh flour and water (or you can store it for a while in the fridge or freezer and revive it later). This bakery in San Franscisco has been using the same “mother dough” since 1849.

While I was away hitch-hiking last year, my old starter died. I discovered the jar recently, toppled over under our kitchen bench. When I peered at the jar’s congealed innards, it I realised that both of us – the culture and I – were petrified.

Its death was apt. Over the last few years, I had made a number of half-hearted attempts at baking bread, but gave up, not really knowing what I was doing.

But then I fell in love with Les Bartlett’s small bakery near Maleny on the Sunshine Coast. There I met Penny, a fellow Melbournian, who was staying there to learn Les’s craft. Earlier this year I saw Penny again and she brought me a sample of his sourdough plant. For most of this year, I’ve been baking twice a week. I am only beginning to learn.

This is what my jar looked like the other day:

Last week, I was talking with a good friend whose grandmother died recently. He was driving to visit her one morning, when he received a call saying she’d passed away. While we talked, I began to think about my family.

Two years ago my grandparents on my mother’s side died within a week of each other. At that time I gained solace from the wisdom of another friend, Daniela from Argentina.

Daniela is the person who first showed me how to bake bread, while I stayed for weeks at her remote camping ground – Ecocamping Ñorquinco – on the edge of a lake, in a national park, in northern Patagonia. Here she is by the lake, with bread for morning tea:

She told me that while she did not believe in an afterlife, she knew that her relatives, generation upon generation, lived on through her and through her children: not only in their minds – for memories rarely surpass a few generations – but also in their bodies. Her ancestors lived on, physically, through her.

I find this profound; it seems both soulful and scientifically valid. I think of generations stretching back in time, each of us given our substance by those before us, even as we must make our days, minds and bodies our own.

Sourdough is like that. Whenever I open my jar of culture to begin a new batch, I call upon a living portion of the past. The mother loaf goes back to Les, and maybe beyond. Its family tree extends through all those with whom he’s shared it, and on and on, in turn.