Michael Green

Writer and producer

Greening of Gavin

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One Melbournian has turned an epiphany into an example.

IN September 2006, Melton resident Gavin Webber attended a movie screening organised by his workplace. “There were about 100 of us and we all went and watched An Inconvenient Truth, of all things,” he says.

Before that day, the IT-professional admits, he was a “conspicuous consumer”.

“I’d buy a new computer every year, entertainment gear, DVDs, clothes – I didn’t care where they came from. I was just steaming along like anybody else.”

But halfway through the documentary on climate change, he was physically and emotionally overwhelmed. “This wave of guilt from sins past came over me,” he says. “I started to think, ‘Holy shit, why don’t I know about this? This is going to affect the future of my kids, my unborn grandkids and everybody – all life on the planet – if we don’t do something about it.’ By the end, I was blubbering.”

Afterwards, when his colleagues caught a cab back to the office, Mr Webber walked instead, trying to come to terms with what he’d just seen.

“I worked in South Yarra at the time, so I walked back along the river. I was crying and angry, and wondering: ‘What am I meant to do?’ I was totally confused.

“But when I got to work I started researching and found out what I could do. It all went from there; I haven’t lost that passion or the sense of urgency that spurs me on everyday to live a more sustainable lifestyle,” he says.

There was a minor catch, however. After a fortnight observing his strange behaviour, Mr Webber’s wife, Kim, was worried. “She thought I was having an affair,” he laughs. “I was just researching like fury, trying to find out more and more.”

When Kim saw the documentary, she had a similar realisation. Within four months, the family had reduced their household power consumption by nearly two-thirds.

Encouraged by friends, Mr Webber decided to start a blog. He called it The Greening of Gavin. He posts something new nearly everyday: podcasts, videos, photos, opinion pieces and DIY advice, on topics ranging from peak oil adaptation to mozzarella-making. Recently, he won a blog of the year competition run by eco-magazine ReNew.

“I’m an average bloke. I’ve got a nine-to-five job during the week and I’ve got four kids and an average suburban block. If I can do it, anyone can,” he says. “It’s been very rewarding – taking our home from a bog-standard, four-bedroom house and converting it into a sustainable living paradise.”

Inside, one of the more unusual steps the family took was to convert open archways to walls and doors, so they could zone heating and cooling to smaller living areas. Outside, they’ve installed several large vegie beds, built chook runs and planted over two-dozen fruit trees.

“The front yard is no longer lawn, it’s a 13-fruit-tree orchard,” he says. “As soon as you walk through the main gate, you see the food growing and you get a big eye-full of solar panels on the garage roof. We designed it that way.”

It’s all part of spreading the word. To that end, Mr Webber has also founded a local sustainability group. So far, the members number in dozens, not thousands, but it’s growing. “Melton wasn’t that sort of place and now it’s starting to change,” he says. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Garage sale trail

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Get ready to haggle at garage sales all over the country.

THREE years ago, Andrew Valder was helping organise a community festival in Bondi Beach.

“We had things like surfing, music, film and arts,” he says. “But we also had a garage sale trail component.”

Around Bondi, he says, abandoned furniture is as common as bikinis and board shorts. The suburb has a transient population and people often ditch their belongings when they skip town. While some of the goods are scavenged, most wind up in landfill.

“We gave people the opportunity to register a sale on a website, give it a name, and list what they were selling,” Mr Valder says. “It went bonkers. We hoped to have 30 garage sales on the day and we got 130.”

Spurred on by their surprise success, Valder and his team decided to take the Garage Sale Trail national last year. It went bonkers again. There were over 3000 sales on the day, attended by about 80,000 shoppers. On average, each seller earned $330.

This year’s Garage Sale Trail will be held next Saturday, May 5. To be part of it, you can list your event online and post pictures and prices for items. Bargain-hunters can search the sales and map out your route for the day.

Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, says the Garage Sale Trail is a perfect example of the way technology can help to redistribute goods from people who don’t want them to people who do.

In her book, she summarises the costs of our hyper-consumption society, from environmental disasters such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the straightjacket of an earn-spend-store lifestyle. Then she explains how the internet is enabling a different approach altogether by efficiently matching people who want to share, barter, lend, trade, rent, gift and swap.

She argues that the rise of this ‘collaborative consumption’ draws on a realisation that we can’t solve our problems by buying more “greener goods”.

“A hybrid car is fantastic, but it still sits there for 23 hours of the day – that’s an efficiency problem,” she says. “In creating environmentally better products, we still create more of them. That isn’t a long-term, sustainable solution in itself.”

Instead, she sees the start of a deep shift in the value we place on ownership. “People are getting used to accessing the benefits of things, rather than needing to own them outright.”

Ms Botsman says another benefit of the Garage Sale Trail, and other tech-fuelled initiatives like it, lies in getting people together face-to-face, away from their screens.

“We’re just starting to see how technology is enabling us to forge very local connections and that’s the next wave of change – it will help bring us back to our neighbourhoods,” she says.

In surveys from last year’s trail, participants reported they’d met an average of six neighbours for the first time. “It’s really about building community and giving people an opportunity to do what they want to do, which is to connect with one another,” Mr Valder says.

And they have fun in the process. “You see such interesting things for sale – someone has listed a horse and cart this year,” he says. “Last year someone listed a whole house. They also listed a flatmate, but I’m not sure how serious that was.”

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Composting coffee grinds

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Pep up your soil and cut landfill waste with spent coffee grinds.

WHEN Shane Genziuk was very young, he loved gardening – but by his teenage years, he’d lost interest. Then in 2010, he had an epiphany. A stray onion had sprouted in his cupboard; on a whim, the 39-year-old IT-manager popped it in the earth.

“I didn’t think twice about it, but later when I saw it had started to flower all by itself, I thought it was so beautiful. I just wanted to try growing other things,” he says.

He approached his new hobby with zeal, but something slowed him down. Mr Genziuk and his family live on very sandy soil in Bentleigh.

“It’s a real struggle for gardeners out here,” he says. “I wanted to build up my soil fertility as naturally as possible, so I didn’t want to use commercial fertilisers.”

Surfing the web for tips, he came across a reference to used coffee grounds. “I got my hands on some and started using them in compost and it was so good I needed more,” he says.

Now, he collects grounds from five different cafes. He uses them to make compost, together with other unwanted resources mined from suburbia: his neighbours’ grass clippings and wilted vegies from a local greengrocer.

“I bring home tonnes of stuff and compost it all and create this amazing soil. But coffee grounds are the basis of it.”

Mr Genziuk started a blog, called Ground to Ground, extolling the virtues of collecting the daily grind. He has even created a logo for participating cafes to put in their windows.


While he doesn’t keep track of participants, he knows of at least 50 cafes, and more than 100 householders who are taking his advice. In his CBD office, over forty people collect from several cafes – between them, they haul away about 200 kilograms each week.

A similar scheme, called Compost Mates, has been trialled elsewhere in Melbourne. Coordinated by Cultivating Community, the project involves householders collecting coffee grounds and certain kinds of kitchen waste (no meat, no plate scrapings) from cafes.

The organisation’s composting guru, Hannah Moloney, says the used grounds have a good balance of carbon and nitrogen and are slightly acidic. “They’re perfect to use in compost, layered with a mix of materials,” she says. (Fallen autumn leaves and food scraps are easy, free accompaniments.)

Ms Moloney says gardeners can also apply spent grounds to vegie patches as mulch (in moderation), or spread them around seedlings as a snail deterrent.

In Clifton Hill, residents have been collecting buckets of coffee grounds and kitchen scraps every day from two venues, Squirrel Café and Café Quince. “They’ve diverted over 8 tonnes from landfill in the last year,” she says.

For Mr Genziuk, observing the way we discard coffee grounds has been a catalyst for thinking more broadly about our way of life and the resources we waste. Now, his fertile backyard is not only stocked with vegies, but also fruit trees, quails, and fish (in an aquaponics system).

“I think we have a lot of problems in society, with the way we’ve become so disconnected to natural cycles,” he says.

“Coffee is just one thing, and every café generates at least 50 kilos of grounds a week. Every time I see a café, I know they serve coffee, but now I know they give away fertiliser as well.”

Read this article at The Age online

Fridges

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Refrigerators eat up energy, unless you choose wisely.

BACK in 2004, Dr Tom Chalko had just built an off-grid eco-house at Mount Best, in South Gippsland. But during the summer, while he waited for his solar panels to arrive, he was short on electricity.

“I needed refrigeration, but I didn’t have enough energy for it,” he recalls. “My small vertical fridge was consuming more energy than my wind turbine was able to produce.”

So the retired physics academic set about solving his problem. Suspecting that chest freezers were more efficient, he began tinkering with one to suit his needs.

After just a few days, he gave his old vertical fridge away.

When it comes to retaining cold air, conventional fridges have a bafflingly straightforward design flaw: every time you open the door, cold air escapes. That doesn’t happen with a chest freezer.

“When you open the horizontal door, no warm air gets in – because cool air is heavier, it stays in the fridge,” Dr Chalko says.

He devised a thermostat that kept a chest freezer at fridge temperatures and, for even better efficiency, cut off standby power while the compressor wasn’t running.

His converted chest fridge now runs for only about two minutes every hour, and consumes an average of about 0.1 kilowatt-hours per day. That’s about ten times less than the best vertical fridges, and up to fifty times less than the worst energy guzzlers.

There’s been another, unexpected benefit too: reduced food spoilage. “My motivation was efficiency, but the best thing is the food preserving performance,” he says.

“I still can’t get over it. Because of the reduced temperature fluctuations, food-spoiling microorganisms don’t breed. I can go shopping once a month and I always pull fresh produce from the fridge.”

If you want to make your own one, Dr Chalko has published instructions (including a lengthy list of parts) on his website. He also makes and sells the thermostats himself ($150).

He argues that in Victoria, because of the inefficiency of brown coal power plants, and further losses that occur in electricity transmission, any energy waste at the household level is amplified many times.

“Earth is a system of limited resources and I started considering my house and property that way too,” he says. “My question is always, ‘How can I make the most of what I’ve got?’”

For many Australian households, the first step is to switch off the second fridge that’s whirring away in the garage.

“If you buy a new fridge and keep the old one running, you’ve actually taken a big step backwards,” says building efficiency expert Peter Reefman. “It’s important to take your old fridge to a good recycling centre.”

When he tested the energy consumption of his refrigerator, he found it was the biggest energy user in the house, by a long way. Now, his new, more efficient one saves him about $200 a year.

You can compare different makes and models on the government’s Energy Rating website. But, as Mr Reefman says, always bear in mind that “the stars lie”.

The ratings compare like with like, so a huge double-door fridge can score more stars than a small unit. To understand what it will cost to run, look at the energy consumption figure on the sticker.

“Buy the smallest fridge possible, and try to get one that consumes 1 kilowatt-hour per day, or less,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Fungi

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Wild mushrooms are just the tip of the iceberg.

FOR this year, stone fruits are over. Berries have been and gone. But another kind of fruit has begun to bloom. “If you get early rains and the earth’s still warm, then you get early fruiting of fungi,” explains Alison Pouliot. “They’re the ideal conditions to see mushrooms popping up.”

Each autumn, Ms Pouliot, who is a research scientist and photographer, runs a series of workshops on fungal ecology in several towns around central Victoria. For these few months, she goes fungus spotting nearly every day, and photographs and surveys what she finds.

Mushrooms, she’s quick to point out, are like the oranges dangling from a tree – they’re the fungal fruit. The fungal mass, known as the mycelium, grows underground all year round.

That’s the first thing to know – but there’s more. Fungi have colonised almost every kind of terrestrial habitat, from arid deserts to city backyards. Ms Pouliot says they matter for householders, not just scientists.

“If you’re thinking about how to live sustainably then you need a good appreciation of natural ecosystems. You need to be aware of the connections, whether it’s weather patterns, the way water moves through the earth, or understanding soils and vegetation,” she says.

Although they’re often overlooked, fungi are a critical part of those ecosystems: nearly all plants have fungal partners below the surface, helping their roots take up nutrients.

Even so, many of us look warily upon a clump of toadstools on our compost pile. Ms Pouliot says we need to challenge our preconceptions.

“They’re the earth’s major decomposers, so anyone who wants to improve their soil should take them into consideration. As soon as you put pesticides and toxins into an environment, fungi won’t grow. In a sense, they’re an indicator of a healthy environment,” she says.

In Australia, we have much a greater diversity of species than Europe, but we’ve only identified about one-tenth of them. So far, we know very little about what we’ve got and where it grows.

That’s where Fungimap comes in. Run by Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, it enlists experts and enthusiasts to document the whereabouts of 115 target species.

Ms Pouliot says interest in the mapping project is growing, spawned in part by newfound enthusiasm for foraging. But while she considers wild mushrooms “an untapped food source”, she’s adamant that our culinary desires must come a distant second to general knowledge. Correct identification takes practice and care, because many species have poisonous lookalikes.

“There are so many fungi out there and many are edible, but I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to know what you’re picking. You should never ever collect anything unless you can be 100 per cent sure of its identification,” she says.

Ms Pouliot lives half the year here and half in Switzerland. She has two autumns, and hence, two mushroom seasons. Her fascination stemmed from sightings on childhood rambles through the bush. “They were always curious, bizarre things, like jewels of the forest,” she recalls.

“You see these amazing colours and forms. Some are shaped like starfish, some like mirror balls and some like cups. And some are so short lived – they only appear for a day or so and then they’re gone. There’s an intriguing, ephemeral quality about them.”

Read this article at The Age online