Michael Green

Writer and producer

Greener apartment blocks

In Architecture and building, Environment on

YOU’D think apartments would have smaller eco-footprints than houses – after all, they’re usually smaller and stacked up, not sprawling. But are high-rise inhabitants really justified in looking down upon energy-guzzling suburbanites?

In 2005 Paul Myors, from EnergyAustralia, investigated the carbon emissions of different kinds of housing for the NSW Department of Planning (PDF). Surprisingly, he found that apartment-dwellers account for more greenhouse gas emissions than residents in detached housing (not including transportation).

Myors laid the blame at the energy consumption of common areas, together with lower occupancy rates in apartments.

Michael Buxton, professor of environment and planning at RMIT, confirms that high-rise residential buildings – above about nine storeys – tend to be very poor performers. “That’s partly because they often use a lot of glass in construction,” he says. “But they also have lifts, big foyers and lots of large spaces that have to be heated, as well as other facilities like gyms and pools.”

“The best energy performance comes from attached buildings such as townhouses and villas – your classic medium density,” Buxton says. According to Myors’ research, a typical townhouse produces about half the carbon emissions of a high-rise apartment.

So what can eco-minded apartment dwellers do to lift their game?

This article explores the ways you can go green in common. I’ll bypass the standard steps individuals can take within their own walls, and focus on the measures that transform the building as a whole.

Owners corporations

If retrofitting your own home looks confusing, the added challenge of common property can be mind-boggling. “With collective decision-making and volunteer committees, there’s a whole layer of complexity that gets in the way of change,” says Christine Byrne, founder of eco-website Green Strata.

As a first step, she suggests green-minded strata-title owners join the management committee of their building. “If you’re on the committee, it’s easier to get access to information and put items on agendas,” she says. (The task is harder for renters; unfortunately, you’ll have to convince owners to take up the case for you.)

Once you’re there, Byrne suggests getting a picture of exactly what you’re all consuming. The best way to do that is by commissioning an environmental audit of the building. At the least, make sure you’re actually seeing your bills, not just paying them automatically.

“Start to make a list of what’s happening in your building and work through the options,” she says. “The bigger your building, the more you can do, because the greater your water and energy consumption. With smaller buildings the options might be things like double-glazing, waste and composting.”

Lighting

As in any existing home or office, improving lighting efficiency is the easiest step – and some changes will cost nothing at all.

In a case study detailed on Green Strata, Nexus apartments in St Leonards, Sydney, found the fluorescent globes in its car park were illuminating the space well beyond what was necessary. So the building manager simply removed almost half the tubes.

“Walk around your building and look at every light,” suggests Byrne. “Can outdoor lights be solar lights? Consider timers, motion sensors and LEDs – for every space there’s a different solution. De-lamping is an easy step, but you have to make sure the level of lighting still complies with Australian Standards.”

Nexus also installed day/night detectors for the compact fluorescent globes under its awnings, as well as motion sensors in the plant and utility rooms. Both measures meant that the lights no longer ran 24-hours a day. The cost is expected to be recouped in savings within 12 months.

Water

In buildings taller than three storeys, water consumption packs a double-whammy. Each drop has an associated energy cost for pumping (as well as the energy cost for heating it). And if that’s not concern enough, in most apartments, residents don’t have separate water meters.

“People aren’t paying for water based on their own consumption,” says Byrne. “The water use of some of these big buildings is quite horrific and it can be very poor in the older ones as well.”

While this is a problem, it’s also an opportunity for serious savings. Miramar Apartments, a 38-storey building in the Sydney CBD, undertook an audit by Sydney Water. The assessment identified major leaks and found that most tap fittings and showerheads were inefficient. Each apartment was retrofitted by the utility under its WaterFix program (which costs as little as $22 per dwelling).

For measures that totalled about $7000, the building cut its water use by one-fifth. It saves about $64,000 each year on water and energy bills combined.

“We’re starting to see owners corporations agreeing to pay for the WaterFix,” Byrne says. “You have to do annual fire inspections, so at the same time, why not do an annual water inspection?”

Hot water

If you have to wait a long time for hot water, it’s likely there’s something amiss in the pipes. Many large buildings have centralised hot water that uses a ring main system – a pipe that loops from the boiler, past all levels and back again.

In this kind of system, broken valves, cross-connections and lack of insulation on pipes can cause a lot waste.

The Sustainable Living in the City trial, run by the Melbourne City Council in 2008, found that some residents in high-rise apartment buildings were waiting up to ten minutes for their hot water to flow.

Dorothy LeClaire oversees the owners corporation department at from Melbourne in the City Management, which manages three of the buildings that took part in the trial. One of the key recommendations was that plumbers assess the ring main system. And for some residents there was an instant benefit: immediate hot water.

“When you do ring main balancing, the hot water comes a lot quicker,” she says. “It saves water, obviously – there’s less cold water going down the drain. But it also saves energy because you have to heat less water.

Waste

When Melbourne City Councillor Cathy Oke moved into her CBD apartment, she found there was no recycling collection at all. “Residential recycling rates in the city are terrible,” she says.

But it’s not just city apartments that don’t get it right. In most multi-dwelling blocks, recycling is less convenient than in stand-alone dwellings. Without dedicated areas and separate chute systems, bins usually become a jumble of rubbish and recyclables.

In Oke’s building, recycling bins have been moved off each floor and she uses a special container, supplied by the council, to sort and transport her recyclables.

“It’s like a funky yellow shopping basket that’s easily tip-able. It fits neatly in my small kitchen,” she says. “If you move the recycle bins to reduce contamination, you have to make it easy to go to those locations.”

The best method will vary from building to building, depending on the space: the key is to make the chore as convenient as possible. Good signage, with colour coding and clear instructions can help focus the most absent-minded residents, so try asking your local council for education material.

Composting is always tricky in apartments, but to encourage residents, owners corporations can organise bulk purchase of worm farms or Bokashi Buckets, together with a workshop to get people started. In some buildings, enthusiastic residents have established communal composting on shared garden space.

Case study: Signature Apartments

At the suggestion of a resident, Signature Apartments turned to technology to create a sense of community. The building, in Redfern, Sydney, has created its own Facebook page.

Robert Goodall, an apartment owner and the chairperson of Signature’s management committee, is one of two people who moderate the page.

“There are 100 units in our building. A lot of us felt that within apartment buildings nobody ever knows their neighbours,” he says.

“We thought Facebook would be a way to get feedback on how the building was going. And for greening the apartments, we could post ideas and get comments. We were looking at installing a communal compost bin to reduce our waste and when posted that we got lots of positive responses.”

For now, about fifty people ‘like’ the page, and Goodall says many more visit it regularly. Among other things, residents have used it to borrow and lend things, and to recycle unwanted furniture.

He has also used Facebook to promote the building’s bike room. Low-impact transportation is one clear advantage apartment-dwellers have over suburban householders – they’re usually much closer to shops, workplaces and public transport. But when it comes to bike-friendly infrastructure, most buildings still don’t provide the goods.

A bike room had been planned for Signature Apartments, but when residents moved in, it hadn’t been fitted out. The committee conducted research on racks, layouts and costs.

“There are a lot of options out there. The internet is a good place to do a general browse and see what you can find,” Goodall says.

“Having the room is good because it takes the bikes out of all the common areas where people were locking them. And for riders, it gives us a safe place to store our bikes.”

This article was published by Sanctuary Magazine

Flying

In Greener Homes on

Plane travel is the forgotten baggage on the green-home carousel

The carbon footprint of a return flight to London is about the same as the average household’s yearly carbon footprint, according to Moreland Energy Foundation.

When Helen O’Shea, from North Fitzroy, first heard about the greenhouse impact of flying, the information stopped her in her tracks. “Like many other people, I’d changed the light globes, got solar panels and reduced my driving,” she says. “But I realised you can’t take a holiday from that once a year and virtually double your carbon emissions.”

So, four years ago, Ms O’Shea decided not to fly.

She retired recently, after a career in academia in which she had worked around Australia and overseas. “I have friends on the other side of the world who I’d dearly love to see every year, but if I’m serious about adapting my lifestyle to the needs of society and the planet, then I think I can’t do that,” she says.

“Like every resolution, it stands to be broken, but I’ve set myself a goal – and it’s a journey in itself.”

As a part of its Zero Carbon Moreland project, Moreland Energy Foundation coordinates activities and retrofitting deals to help people go green. In the last few months, the campaign has focussed on transport, encouraging residents to take public transport, walk, ride and car-share.

Asha Bee-Abraham, from the foundation, says that if we’re serious about reducing our emissions, we must also think twice about long-haul travel.

“Flying does matter. It’s a difficult issue, because it’s become more and more accessible. And as we’ve globalised, our relationships have spanned the world.

“We’re not asking people to give up the air cold-turkey, but encouraging them to pause and think before they book a flight. Can you have a similar experience more locally, or travel by train or bus instead?”

In the office, she says, workers can try video conferencing instead of scheduling interstate or overseas meetings.

The foundation compared the greenhouse emissions of a journey between Melbourne and Sydney by plane, bus and car, with different passenger numbers. For just one person, driving came out worst, followed by plane and bus. But with a full car, driving was the most efficient.

Ms Bee-Abraham says that although offsetting your flights can be worthwhile, you must do your research. Costs and calculations vary widely, depending on the kind of offset and its assumptions about the aircraft’s load and efficiency, and the effect of emissions at high altitudes. The Carbon Offset Guide website recommends making sure the offsets are independently verified and comply with recognised standards.

(For an alternative take on offsets, visit Cheatneutral, a satirical website which allows cheating partners to balance their infidelity by sponsoring the celibate or monogamous.)

Throughout May, Ms Bee-Abraham is running a local adventures campaign. “Travelling broadens our perspectives, but there are ways we can travel that don’t involve flying. In Melbourne we’re surrounded by beautiful scenery and national parks, as well as places where people can pamper themselves and see things that are very different to our day-to-day lives,” she says.

Likewise, Ms O’Shea says her resolution hasn’t meant foregoing all fun. “If I want to visit friends or have a trip, I take the train and turn holidays into a time where the travel itself is a big part of the adventure.”

Read this article at The Age online

For extra inspiration, obey gravity with short story writer Laura Jean McKay. She’s blogging about a year without flying.

Home occupancy

In Greener Homes on

Why big households are better than big houses

OVER the last century, Australians have lived increasingly alone. When the first national census was conducted in 1911, an average of 4.5 people lived in each home. By the most recent census, the number had nearly halved.

But at the same time, we’ve been building bigger houses – a report by CommSec in late 2009 found our new dwellings were the world’s largest – and affordability has fallen.

As permaculture founder David Holmgren summarises: “We’ve got bigger houses, with more stuff and fewer people in them.”

Proportionally, smaller households use more energy and create more greenhouse emissions than larger ones.

“As you get down to double- and single-person homes, the efficiency of the household economy falls,” Mr Holmgren says. “Food preparation, food wastage, heating, cleaning and maintenance all become a bigger load for less benefit.

“And when it comes to more self-reliant living, in a small household you can’t do as many things, like growing and preserving food, keeping animals, or your own building and renovation.”

He notes that not only are fewer people living together, but we’re also spending fewer hours at home. The combination forces ever-more development, jams our transport systems and exacerbates social isolation.

“Our cities are crowded by empty buildings under lock and key, with people racing between them – whether it’s to work, the gymnasium, the restaurant or the childcare centre,” he says.

Given the spare capacity in existing housing stock, he argues the case for “higher density living”, not higher density building.

Bigger households, where people are home more often, are likely to be consuming less, producing more of their own needs and contributing to the vitality of the local area.

So how can we live in larger numbers? Mr Holmgren says the two most common ways are to take in boarders or share with extended family.

“From a hard-nosed, self-interested perspective, if you’re a homeowner with a mortgage, renting the spare room out to a boarder is the best thing you can do to reduce your debt burden,” he says.

Likewise, Ed McKinley, of the Groupwork Institute of Australia, argues young people should consider the financial, social and environmental plusses of teaming up to buy a house.

“It’s one way younger people can enter the market and still live in the groovy parts of the city,” he says. “There are big blocks around with enormous scope to be cleverly reconfigured to meet individual, family and group needs.”

From this Friday to Sunday, the institute is running a short course on living and working well together. Mr McKinley draws expertise from nearly three decades living at the Commonground community, near Seymour.

“People are frightened it won’t go well and they won’t get their own space. They’re real concerns, but you can make agreements upfront,” he says. “You can be clear about what is going to happen when someone leaves or if people get into conflict. You can set up good processes and expectations to deal with those things.”

And while the concerns are real, so are the benefits. “It’s about having one block working a lot harder,” he says. “You might need to work less to afford that location. Your utility costs drop dramatically and you may have more capacity to install things like solar panels or solar hot water.”

Star ratings lost in space

In Architecture and building, The Age on

Governments have failed to ensure house energy ratings become reality

MOST new homes don’t measure up to their energy rating, building industry experts warn. Since the start of May, all new houses and renovations in Victoria must reach six stars, but because of shoddy insulation and inadequate draught sealing, householders’ bills may continue to rise.

Despite steadily lifting the stringency of energy ratings, the industry’s regulators have not enforced those standards in the way homes are built. There is no inspection or auditing process to ensure houses comply with efficiency specifications.

House energy consultant Blair Freeman, from Energy Leaks, says eight out of every ten residences he audits have poorly installed or missing insulation – especially in walls, around window frames and towards the perimeter of ceilings.

“People are paying for a five or six star home and not getting it,” he says. “The rating software is a great start – it gives you an assessment of the drawings – but no one assesses the home.”

Freeman photographs the insides of houses with a thermal camera. If it’s warm outside, the images show hot spots where insulation is gappy. Too often, he says, the new houses in his photos glow like hot coals. “It’s a big problem and it’s all to do with poor installation of insulation.”

Similarly, draught testing company Air Barrier Technologies has found air leakage in new homes to be five to 10 times worse than expected under the star-rating models.

Wayne Liddy, a building surveyor and former president of the Australian Institute of Building Surveyors Victoria, says he’s concerned new houses don’t meet the efficiency expectations of homeowners.

Building surveyors assess compliance with the star rating paperwork, but do not check those features in fabric of the building itself. They are not required to monitor the quality of the installation of insulation or draught sealing.

“There’s a big gap in compliance,” Mr Liddy says. “We could have a very embarrassing situation when mandatory disclosure [of energy ratings at the point of sale or lease] comes in. Most houses that have a building permit with a report giving them five stars may be lucky to get to two stars.”

But Victorian Building Commissioner Tony Arnel says people must understand that the rating scheme is a design tool, not an on-the-ground assessment. “The quality of building varies, like everything in life,” he says.

“Where houses are built that have more air gaps and leakage issues, then potentially they will be below the five-star standard. But that’s not to say those houses don’t comply with the regulations.”

The Building Commission conducts “desk-top audits” of compliance with the rating standards, Mr Arnel says. “Quality assurance is a contractual responsibility between the owner and the builder. That’s what you pay for.”

Kristin Brookfield, building and environment director of the Housing Industry Association, says she has not seen any evidence of a systemic problem. “We will always support the view that our members understand their obligations and are delivering homes to the expectations of the law and the customer.”

Even so, Ms Brookfield says she would not be surprised if some states introduced an extra building inspection targeting energy efficiency measures. “But it needs to be done in a way doesn’t slow everything down and cost thousands of dollars,” she says.

Misgivings about the scheme’s governance extend to the oversight of ratings assessors. Until March this year, Sustainability Victoria was responsible for supervising the performance of accredited house energy raters. However, according to a spokesperson for the agency, due to “resource constraints”, it did not audit any ratings after June 2004 – a gap of nearly seven years.

The role has now been outsourced to the Building Designers Association of Victoria and the Association of Building Sustainability Assessors.

Architect and environmental design consultant Chris Barnett, from Third Skin Sustainability, says this kind of ineffective regulation is undermining the rating scheme’s credibility.

To improve compliance in the industry, Mr Barnett says regulators should urgently consider a range of changes, including random ‘as-built’ audits and additional checks by surveyors or sustainability assessors, along with training and education campaigns for builders.

Why we can’t see the insulation for the walls

Before the five-star regulations began in 2005, Tony Isaacs recalls, the building industry campaigned vigorously against the rules.

“There was a lot of fear among builders because it was a big change,” he says. “But because of the size of the change there was also a view [in government] that, strictly speaking, there should be an additional inspection – particularly for insulation.”

The extra check was not introduced. At the time, Mr Isaacs was the project manager responsible for the new regulations at the (then) Sustainable Energy Authority Victoria. He also developed FirstRate, the software tool commonly used in Victoria to analyse the efficiency of housing designs.

Now senior research fellow at RMIT’s Centre for Design, Mr Isaacs says both the house energy raters and the actual buildings must be assessed more rigorously.

“There needs to be some checking done of the people who do the ratings in the first place, to make sure they’re accurate,” Mr Isaacs says.

“Someone has to come up with the dollars to check the ratings and to check the buildings. The measures we’ve used so far have clearly got holes through which people can get away with building to a lesser standard, and unless we check them more rigorously we just don’t know how well they’re performing.”

Building the ratings into a home

Chris Jensen, from Greensphere Consulting, has conducted over 10,000 house energy ratings. He also lectures in building energy modelling at the University of Melbourne’s architecture faculty.

But when he came to renovate his own home in Port Melbourne, he was shocked at the disconnection between the software modelling and the finished product.

“We’re at lock up stage, and I could have put cheese in the walls. There’s no point at which the energy efficiency measures in the building really get checked. As the builder, I’m just expected to have met that standard, because that’s what the building permit states,” he says.

He says that while he strongly supports the energy rating system, he is concerned about the way it translates into built houses.

“Insulation, gaps and cracks are the main issues, because you can’t see them. The other big worry is that the report doesn’t make it easy for builders to understand what’s required,” he says.

“My house could be built at two-star, if it wasn’t done properly, and I wouldn’t know. It really is that bad.”

Read this article at The Age online

Smart garden watering

In Greener Homes on

A new web guide will help straighten your irrigation

MELBOURNE has begun 2011 with record rainfall, but there’s no guarantee that the lush times will continue. The Bureau of Meteorology predicts that the La Niña conditions that brought the big wet will dissipate by wintertime.

By historical terms, the city’s dams are still low, and stage two water restrictions will remain at least until spring. That means householders still aren’t allowed to water their lawns from the mains. Gardens, however, can be watered by hand at any time, or every second day, at specified times, with manual and automatic irrigation systems. (You can find the full details about stage two restrictions on the Melbourne Water website.)

Geoff Connellan, from the University of Melbourne’s School of Land and Environment, says that just because we can water more often, doesn’t mean we should.

“The most common mistake people make in their gardens is to over-water, because they don’t understand how much water different plants need and how much moisture can be stored in the soil,” he says.

Together with Dr Jon Pearce and a team from the university, Mr Connellan has spent five years developing a free, online tool, called Smart Garden Watering, which helps you understand how to give your garden the right amount of water at the right time.

Using the website, you can calculate your water needs by entering all the details of your garden, including the location, size, slope and soil conditions, as well as the watering method and the types of plants and mulch.

The program draws on localised climate data and soil conditions, together with a database called the Burnley Plant Directory, which comprises over 1500 Australian and exotic plants.

Because it requires such detailed local data, the system is only available to residents in Melbourne and Geelong – for now, at least. “It does calculations for your postcode,” Mr Connellan says. “That’s important, because if you think of a garden in Sunbury and a garden in Olinda, they’re two totally different scenarios.”

The site is sprinkled with facts and features. It includes a Facebook application as well as maps, photos and forums that allow users to see other people’s gardens in their area, contact the gardeners and learn from each other’s experiences.

You can also plug in the details of your water tanks and see their likely storage levels throughout the year, based on the irrigation needs of the garden.

The results can be used not only to help you better understand your plants, but also to see what would happen if you re-designed your backyard. The website is interactive – you can toy with the settings and see how they affect your water consumption.

“It’s a sophisticated tool, but we’ve found that once people have become used to it, they are happy to play around with the options,” Mr Connellan says. “For example, if you choose drip irrigation or spray irrigation, or mulch or no mulch, you can see the consumption changing.

“That’s a very powerful graphical tool for a user. It encourages people to select efficient irrigation methods, and plants with low water needs.”

As a general tip, Mr Connellan recommends drip irrigation systems, underneath a layer of mulch of between 50 and 75 millimetres.

“Most people with plumbed watering systems can save about a third of the water they’re using, if they water wisely.”

Read this article at The Age online