Michael Green

Writer and producer

Life cycle assessment

In Architecture and building, Environment on

Life cycle assessment reveals more than ever about the impact of building products.

IF you want to reduce your construction footprint, sooner or later you’ll need to dive into the murky world of materials.

Take a deep breath first. It’s a place where everything is connected and the products have different impacts, but it’s hard to tell exactly how they relate to one another, and how big the differences are.

In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to the concept of embodied energy: it’s shorthand for all the energy used to make a product, from the mining and processing of base materials, to the packaging and delivery of the manufactured goods.

Now, life cycle assessment is becoming increasingly common. “Embodied energy measures only the energy aspect, whereas life cycle assessment measures all the environmental impacts,” says Dr Usha Iyer-Raniga, assistant director of RMIT’s Centre for Design. “It’s not just about energy, but also about biodiversity, greenhouse gasses, land use and toxins.”

Tim Grant, from consultancy Life Cycle Strategies, says that the depth and rigour of life cycle research sets it apart.

“Life cycle assessment is an internationally standardised methodology for analysing the impacts of products and services. It looks at the cradle-to-grave impacts, including all the relevant environmental indicators,” he says.

The function of the product is a key part of the analysis: nothing can be viewed in isolation. “The assessment becomes very complicated in building industry, because we don’t use materials as they are,” Iyer-Raniga says. “You’ve got to think about how those materials are assembled together to become a square meter of wall, and how the wall performs its role.”

To help solve the puzzles, she suggests householders ask a lot of questions when sourcing products and materials. “People have to be really savvy. There’s a lot of greenwash out there, particularly in the building industry – not just with materials, but with appliances and furniture as well,” she says.

“You need to think about your needs. Is it a house you want to live in for the rest of your life? Think about using long-lasting materials that aren’t entirely dictated by fashion. Consider where the materials come from, how durable they are and whether they need maintenance.”

So far, not much life cycle information has been available for homeowners. The Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society is working on locally relevant environmental impact weightings and a database of products and services, but the project is progressing slowly.

Eco-product database ecoSpecifier recently launched GreenTag, a third-party certification system based on life cycle assessment principles.

Technical director David Baggs agrees that the strength of life cycle analysis is its breadth. “There are lots of carbon calculators available, but as a society we have to be careful to not create counter-productive outcomes by focussing purely on greenhouse gases,” he says.

Under GreenTag, products are compared against a worst-case business-as-usual scenario. They’re rated in four tiers: platinum, gold, silver and bronze (although bronze signifies a health and eco-toxicity rating, not life cycle analysis).

“Once our new website is launched next year, people will be able to see the products’ key performance indicators,” Baggs says. “They could use it to specify minimum standards for their building materials.”

For a rough guide to good life cycle choices, Grant says there are simple rules of thumb for householders to follow. “Firstly, anything that will improve operational efficiency is worth doing, whether it’s solar panels or light sensors that switch lights off automatically. The environmental impacts of production will nearly always be outweighed by savings during the life of the home.

“The second thing is to reduce the size of everything. Smaller buildings use less material, less energy for heating and have less room for furniture and fittings.”

That means modification or refurbishment is preferable to building from scratch, if it can ensure energy efficiency. Earth building techniques such as mudbrick have very little embodied energy, but to remain ahead of the rest, they must also operate efficiently.

“There’s nothing that has no environmental impact,” Grant says. “After doing life cycle assessment, you come to realise that less is more. We really need to reduce our consumption of everything.”

Published in Sanctuary Magazine. Read the article online here.

Place making

In Greener Homes on

A place making conference draws a new map for the city’s public life.

WHAT makes a “good” place? It could be a street where kids can safely chalk their hopscotch squares, a neighbourhood where you walk to the locally owned baker, or a public square that fizzes with action.

According to Gilbert Rochecouste, from Village Well, vibrant places such as these often connect high quality of life with low environmental impacts. They’re likely to reduce private transport and consumption, and encourage food production, green building and socially responsible business practices.

“The biggest thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprint is to create affordable, accessible, amazing places,” he says.

The Melbourne Place Making Series conference will be held from Wednesday 27 to Friday 29 October. It is hosted by VicUrban, together with Village Well, Fed Square, City of Melbourne and the Department of Planning and Community Development.

The series has been running six months, including online discussions and forums for developers, financiers and the community sector. It aims to engage government, industry, planners and international experts on how we can make our city and our suburbs better places to be.

Mr Rochecouste says development too often focuses on hard infrastructure, such as roads, buildings and utilities, at the exclusion of less obvious necessities.

“Place making brings in the soft infrastructure, like the gathering places, the culture, the walk-ability and the daily rituals of living,” he says. “All the things that we yearn for and take for granted when we visit great places, like Europe.

“But we don’t get them here. We’ve taken our model from America and delivered it to disconnected places. We’ve separated living, working and entertaining. Place making brings it all together,” he says.

VicUrban CEO Pru Sanderson says the idea differs from normal urban design in its scope and holistic vision. “Place making cuts across a whole range of disciplines. It is about more than just design,” she says.

“It’s about creating places that are resilient and can grow and respond in a climate-challenged future. We want this to be the mindset for new developments and for revitalising older areas in Melbourne.”

The agency has brought a place-based approach to its Revitalising Central Dandenong initiative. It is transforming the main road, Lonsdale Street, into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and creating areas for people to congregate. It’s also running community arts programs with the local council. “It is about nurturing the economy, culture and physical place all at once,” Ms Sanderson says.

Mr Rochecouste says the best changes are resident-driven, rather than design-driven. “We run participatory democracy sessions, so people are deeply engaged in the process. When you do it well, you get much better places – you get the x-factor,” he says. “People say what they want and how they want it, and we end up with a much more informed and inspired citizenry.”

In that forthright spirit, he says we shouldn’t wait for good places to fall upon us: place making begins at home. “The first physical structure is our household, and then our footpath, street and local shops. All these things are our daily narratives – the more beautiful they are, the more connected, the more people feel like they can say hello to their neighbour. They feel safer,” he says.

“Neighbourhood renewal, street parties and celebrations. All these details add to people’s quality of life. That’s place making.”

The weather on the road

In Blog on

I MADE it to Cairns. It’s a long way to hitch hike. For six weeks, in every lift or chance encounter, I had this exchange:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m heading to Cairns for a friend’s wedding.”

It became a kind of pilgrimage, and Cairns – in my imagination – a lush, secret village in the clouds. I’d never been further north than Fraser Island. What would life hold after Cairns?

With just over a week to go, I was loafing on the Sunshine Coast. I had a closer look at the map of Queensland, and observed that I still had 1700 kilometres to travel. The next day I put out my shingle again. My first lift was from Australia Zoo’s wildlife rescue team. I shared the backseat with kookaburra with a broken wing, sheltering in a cardboard box. The rescuers were on their way to pick up a python from a construction site.

As I got further north, people spoke more and more about the weather. “It’s some strange kind of year, this year,” they’d say. “An early wet – we never even had the dry. The weather’s all mixed up nowadays.” The radio reported predictions of a ferocious storm season coming. Climate change is bringing more intense, variable weather.

One sunny afternoon I waited for hours on the highway at the Bundaberg turn off, just north of Childers. Eventually, I gave up, crossed the road and hitched back into town. The next morning I got an early lift, but my heart sank when I was dropped at the same turnoff.

Hitch hiking is a slow way to travel, but you can’t beat it for the people you meet: beautiful, heavily pregnant Spanish women, South American spiritual drug-takers, travelling salesmen, miners, police. Most of my lifts have been from people who hitched when they were younger, or from lonely middle-aged men.

I waited another hour at the turnoff. Finally, an aging sports car pulled up. It looked like the car from Back to the Future. When I got in, Rodney, the driver, told me at length about the engine, and I tried to rev my approval at all the right moments. He had a chubby face and a curly mullet hairdo, and his eyes had long since parted ways. When I asked where he’d come from, he told me he’d been on suicide watch overnight at the Hervey Bay hospital. “They’re probably still looking for me,” he said. “I’m in a bad way these days.”

Rodney said he didn’t have anyone to talk to about his troubles. We spoke about cars and motorbikes and road maintenance, well past my capacity. He drove to Gin Gin, toured me through the town to the free camping area and returned me to the centre. He showed me great care.

Further north, as I passed through Proserpine – in a little red Mitsubishi driven by a man named Matt – no smoke billowed from the sugar mill. Matt was a plumber-turned-mineworker who grew up in Mount Waverley, the same suburb as I did. He split for the north a decade ago and now lives at Midge Point, near the Laguna Quays resort. “I’d come up here in my twenties, working,” he said. “Everything was a grind in the city, my marriage ended, so I came back – I wanted to find that feeling I had when I was younger, that sweet way of life.”

He told me that so much rain was a curse for the cane farmers. Right now, the earth was too soft and the big harvesters would bog. If the rain keeps up until the wet season proper, the farmers will lose their crop. The mills close in December.

For my friends’ wedding on the beach, at least, the weather held out. And it was, as forecast, a damn good knees-up of a wedding.

The freeway, a long way to go

The Sunshine Coast Highway near Brisbane. A long way to go.

Hepburn Wind

In Greener Homes on

Community-ownership could herald a gust of green power.

CONSTRUCTION is about to begin on Australia’s first community-owned wind farm. The Hepburn Community Wind Park Co-operative held its official groundbreaking ceremony last week at Leonards Hill, 10 kilometres south of Daylesford.

Vicki Horrigan, a director of Hepburn Wind, says the turbines should be ready and rotating by mid-2011. “It’s over five years since the local community here had the idea. And now we’re building a project worth just under $13 million.”

The wind farm comprises two turbines with a combined capacity of 4.1 megawatts. They’ll be built by German company REpower Systems AG and connected to the grid.

“The turbines are estimated to produce about 12,200 megawatt hours each year,” Ms Horrigan says. “That’s enough to power 2300 homes, which is more than the number of households here in Daylesford and Hepburn Springs.”

Hepburn Wind was set up as a co-operative. Membership is open to all Victorians, but there’s a lower minimum investment threshold for locals. All members get one vote, regardless of the size of their shareholding. Once they’re whirling, the turbines will generate a return for members and contribute funding for local projects.

“The structure has been a real bonus for engaging the local community, because they can see the idea came from here and they can participate in it easily,” Ms Horrigan says. “It’s a good financial model, but it’s also a good philosophical model – it’s socially responsible investment.

“People often feel powerless about climate change on a global scale. This project shows that local communities can set up systems that really go towards making ourselves sustainable.”

Precinct-scale power generation can also be much more efficient than a house-by-house approach. The Hepburn Wind turbines will cost far less per household in the area than a comparable roll out of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels.

The group’s success has turned heads. “We get a couple of requests every week from other communities wanting to find out about what we’re doing and how they could start something similar,” Ms Horrigan says.

There’s a lot of advice to pass on – among the thorniest impediments have been raising the capital, estimating costs and gaining planning approval.

For this reason, a spin-off organisation, called Embark, has been founded to support other communities through the process.

Embark’s executive director Mary Dougherty says the organisation is already in contact with about ten groups, including some working on proposals for mini-hydro and solar schemes, as well as wind turbines.

“We’re trying to break down the steps involved and provide practical advice and templates, like business plans, financial models and landholder lease agreements. It’s much easier than starting with a blank slate.”

There are scores of articles on Embark website, covering everything from the ins-and-outs of the energy market, to how to run effective public meetings, together with case studies from both here and abroad.

In Denmark, co-operatives own over a quarter of the country’s wind farms. “In the European countries where these community projects started out, they have a far greater uptake of renewable energy overall. These small projects lead to large ones,” Ms Dougherty says.

“In ten years, we’d love to have started 100 projects. Through all the investors, that translates to about a million people who are exposed to the benefits of renewable energy first hand. That’s really powerful.”

The shipwright

In Blog on

RENNIE gave me a lift from Miriam Vale, north of Bundaberg in Queensland, to Agnes Water, about 40 minutes away on the coast. Agnes Water is the last surf beach before the Great Barrier Reef.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Rennie told me he was going to throw himself in the sea. He had his surfboard stowed in the back of the ute. It sounded like there was something he needed to wash away.

He was 50 years old, with a heavy, but still-athletic build. He shifted constantly in his seat. There was a restlessness about him and the force of it engulfed the cab. He wore a shabby fedora-style hat and had a gap between his front teeth – the combination lent him the air of an old circus performer.

In fact, he was a shipwright by trade, a boat builder. At 14, during his school holidays, he began working as a deckhand on fishing trawlers. Then, at 16, he took three months off school and worked a stint as a cook at sea, and came back with ten grand for his troubles. School couldn’t keep him after that. He began his shipwright’s apprenticeship the next year.

I asked questions and Rennie’s tales tumbled out. He wasn’t a direct storyteller. “Bloomin” was his adjective of choice and he baited every line with it, twice over.

He’d worked on many famous boats and yachts built in this country: Australia II, Sydney-to-Hobart race winners, even Collins class submarines.

Some years ago he packed it in to start a business up north. “It was supposed to be about the simple life. I went to the Whitsundays with lots of money and left with none. It was the dengue. Nearly bloomin‘ killed me.”

Now he worked fixing up mining accommodation, moving from site to site and living each place a while. “All the ugliest places in the bloomin‘ country,” he said. “I never thought I’d be startin‘ again at 50.”

I mentioned that I wrote a column about sustainable housing and living.

“Don’t get me started on the building industry,” he said in a wild staccato, like I’d triggered an eruption, but his throat was too small a passageway for the flow of his mind. “The whole thing’s a bloomin‘ fraud. What’s wrong with this country is there’s too many rules and we’re too bloomin‘ comfortable.”

He told me that in north Queensland, all the coal money meant big, stupid houses. “In Gladstone, people are building garages with turntables in them, so when you drive in, it turns the car around for you.”

Rennie had chosen the timeless way instead. He had bought an expired mining lease on a hill overlooking the water near Gladstone, and was sculpting a small home into the rock, more than a kilometre through bush from the nearest car access. Sheer granite walls and benches.

“Gosh. Incredible!” I was the one gushing now. “I love hearing about handmade homes like that. Amazing. So how’d you do it? Can you just build anything you turn your hands to?”

“You could say that.”

He told me he’d carved a natural swimming pool deep in the rock behind the rest of the home, with a 40-metre skylight shaft. A few barramundi live in the pool. He used mirrors, like the Egyptians did, to shine light from the skylight throughout the other rooms.

He’d been working on the house for 16 years. “Started when my wife was alive. That’s the trouble with life, you know. You think you’ve got a plan and then your wife goes and bloomin‘ dies just to bugger it all up.”

Agnes Water

The beach at Agnes Water