After the bushfires, many people are opting to re-build sustainably.

ANTHONY Smith’s Kinglake home burned down in the Black Saturday fires. “I heard the fire coming,” he says, “and it sounded like hundreds of helicopters droning together in the near distance.

“Once the house started to shake and vibrate with the noise, I thought: ‘I’m out of here’.”

He left, but the home he’d lived in for 24 years was reduced to a few charred stumps. When he set about rebuilding, he decided to do it differently: he wanted a passive solar design, one that would need little power and incur few bills. The home is still under construction, but based on the plans, it will achieve a 9-star energy rating.

Mr Smith is one of a number of residents in the area who are sharing their stories on the Build It Back Green website, coordinated by Green Cross Australia.

Mara Bún, CEO of Green Cross Australia, says personal experiences such as these can propel a wave of change, and not only among those rebuilding from the fires.

“The Black Saturday bushfires captured the hearts and minds of Australians in a deep way, and so we think these stories will inspire people to make changes in their own lives,” she says. “The information on the website about green building is very practical and applicable to everyone in the state.”

The Build It Back Green movement began in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2006. “Now it’s happening all around the world where natural disasters occur and communities want to recover in a sustainable and resilient way,” Ms Bún says.

“The way we rebuild can either refuel the cycle by being very emissions intensive, or it can begin to break the cycle altogether.”

She says the website is a hub of information on low cost, sustainable and resilient building. It includes a guide developed by the Alternative Technology Association, containing tips on green materials and building techniques, together with lists of products and suppliers.

The website also features videos and profiles of people rebuilding from the fires, and details of local events.

“We’re really stressing community participation,” Ms Bún says. “Getting to know your neighbours is a hugely important factor as we confront these threats, especially in Victoria, which has so much risk from climate change.”

Mr Smith, a woodcutter and sawmiller, took time completing the design for his new home. He observed the sun’s path throughout the year before staking the orientation along an east-west axis, with a slight twist towards the sun on winter afternoons. “Kinglake is pretty cold, so I wanted to get maximum sun on the windows during the cooler months,” he says.

He sketched out a three-bedroom house just over 6 metres wide and 28 metres long. “It’s narrow, with a low pitching height,” he says, “so the rooms are very manageable sizes for the sun to warm up.”

The post-and-beam dwelling will have Hebel (Autoclaved Aerated Concrete) block walls and insulated slab floor, with stone paving to provide thermal mass near the north facing, double-glazed windows.

Mr Smith is also using recycled materials wherever he can, including reclaimed timber and bricks from a neighbour’s demolished home. “I felled trees on my block and milled the structural timbers,” he says, “so I’ll have my own floorboards and timber for the roof.”

Hobby beekeepers create the land of food and honey.

LOUISE Davey’s backyard in Coburg is lined with well-tended vegie patches. Chooks cluck in their coop under the fig tree. But the most important residents – the queens of the food garden – live next to the olive tree in the middle of the yard.

Ms Davey has been an amateur apiarist for two years. “I just love watching the bees and getting the honey,” she says. “The people who live around my area love getting it too. I’m keeping quite a few families in honey from my two hives.”

Her bounty, now about 60 kilograms a year, has grown with each harvest. “Because I’m in the suburbs, the honey tastes slightly different every time. It reflects the plants the bees collected the nectar and pollen from,” she says.

There are about 2200 beekeepers registered with the Victorian Department of Primary Industries and around 1800 of those are hobbyists, according to apiary inspector Daniel Martin.

Although each local council has its own bylaws, backyard beekeepers are usually allowed to keep one or two hives, under the state’s Apiary Code of Practice. It is compulsory, however, to register with the department ($15 per year). “Bees are classed as livestock,” Mr Martin says. “Registered beekeepers have access to a honey testing program to help with early detection of an endemic honeybee brood disease.”

He says beekeeping is not only a way to source your own sweet bliss, but also provides an important ecosystem service. “Many people don’t realise that one in every three mouthfuls of food is dependent on honeybee pollination. By keeping bees you’re contributing to your neighbourhood’s food production.”

If you do it well, it’s also good for the bees. “Suburban hives are often really strong because they’re stationary and they’ve got access to nectar and pollen all year round,” Mr Martin says. “Many commercially run hives are migrated around the country and the bees often need supplementary feeding for extra nutrition.”

The DPI website has a series of useful how-to guides on beekeeping and safe management practices.

Beehives must be set back from your fence and should be placed in a sunny, sheltered spot with access to water. It’s best if they don’t face directly towards the street – the bees’ flight path must not cross low over the footpath. As a beekeeper, you’ll need safety equipment, including light-coloured clothing, gloves, a veil, a hive tool and a smoker to distract the bees while you harvest the honey.

Mr Martin says that if you care for your bees responsibly, they’ll happily go about their own beesness.

“Bees are like every animal – if they’re neglected they become unhappy,” he says. “Beekeeping isn’t a skill that comes overnight, so I highly recommend joining or liaising with a local beekeeping club.”

Ms Davey honed her skills with the beekeepers at Collingwood Children’s Farm and CERES in Brunswick. She suggests that newcomers get hands-on experience before they strike out on their own.

“Although bees are fairly low maintenance, it’s a little daunting the first time you open up your hives and you’ve got hundreds of bees flying all around you,” she says.

While she’s suffered her “fair share” of stings, they usually come when a bee inadvertently falls into her slippers. “Bees aren’t aggressive – they’ll only sting if they think they’re being mistreated.”

A new project takes the waste out of wastewater.

WHILE it may seem polite to keep the lid on toilet talk, if you’re pursuing household sustainability, you can’t ignore your sewer.

Rita Narangala, engineer at Yarra Valley Water, explains that our sewerage system not only consumes buckets of potable water, but also demands electricity for pumping and treating.

“It’s something a lot of people don’t immediately think about, but sewage is actually quite energy intensive to collect and treat,” she says. “When you install efficient fittings, it’s a real double-whammy in terms of the savings in water and in the energy for supplying the water and treating the sewage.”

In Kinglake West, Yarra Valley Water is building a research project that changes the way the company deals with our pipes. It undertook a life cycle assessment of wastewater options for the environmentally sensitive area, which is bordered by national park.

When the plumbing and infrastructure is complete, up to 90 homes will have an alternative sewerage service, comprising urine diverting toilets, greywater treatment and reuse systems, and a pressure sewer.

The measures are expected to halve wastewater discharge, slash nutrient discharge by about 80 per cent, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by one-third compared with a conventional sewer.

One element of the approach in Kinglake West is a switch from “nutrient removal” to “nutrient recovery”; that is, turning the problem into a solution.

Presently, the high-nutrient content in effluent can cause pollution in our waterways and bays. It’s a problem that must be overcome by extensive and expensive treatment. At the same time, however, our farmers buy in artificial fertilisers in a quest to boost their soil fertility.

“Urine is rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, so diverting it is an easy way to capture a small fraction of the wastewater, which is nutrient-rich and relatively low in bacteria and pathogens as well,” Ms Narangala says.

Yarra Valley Water will work with a local farmer to trial the use of urine as a fertiliser replacement (most likely on a non-food crop, such as turf). Projects of this kind are well advanced overseas, especially in Scandinavia.

“Phosphorus is an essential plant nutrient – there’s really no replacement for it,” Ms Narangala says. “But there’s a view amongst scientists that reserves could run out in the next few generations. The peak level of production, after which demand outstrips supply, could occur much sooner.

“We need to find alternative nutrient sources – human waste is one, as well as efficiency gains in the way it’s mined and the way we produce food.”

While the solutions adopted by Yarra Valley Water in its Kinglake West project are specifically designed to suit local conditions, they’re a sign of changes in the pipeline elsewhere.

In sewered suburbs it’s more difficult to retrofit large-scale greywater and nutrient recycling all at once. But as urban infill and infrastructure upgrades continue, the utilities will seek out solutions that cut water and energy use, and turn nutrient pollution into a resource.

Ms Narangala says decentralised treatment and recycling may become more common. “Our infrastructure is in the ground already, but we’re looking at alternatives to simply replacing parts when necessary. Water companies recognise that we’re in a unique position to recover and reuse nutrients. The industry is assessing the best ways to build a sustainable sewage system.”

Read this article on the Age website.

For more information on peak phosphorus, see Phosphorus Futures, founded by researchers from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney. 

Transition initiatives are spreading throughout our cities and regions.

IN Northcote, by the railway line, there’s a grand old apple tree. It had long since been neglected, until local artist Cat Wilson began photographing it through the seasons, and volunteers from Transition Darebin held working bees to clean up the site.

“Now we’ve put seats there and had lots of picnics,” says Sally MacAdams from Transition Darebin. “It’s become a lovely community area.”

It might not sound like much, but this small act of civic engagement is part of a big movement buzzing through the western world and beyond.

Transition Darebin is a member of the thriving international Transition Network. The first transition town – Totnes, in Devon, England – was launched in late 2006. Now there are over 600 active groups around the world, 60 of which are in Australia.

“We want to prepare our community for a turbulent time ahead,” Ms MacAdams says. “The government is talking about climate change, but not doing much, and it doesn’t seem like they’re considering it together with the prospect of rising oil prices.”

She says that as oil becomes more difficult to extract, the cost of food and transport could climb steeply. “We have to change the way we live. The approach transition towns takes is that we can change in a way that makes our lives better. We can improve the connectedness and resilience of our communities, mostly through doing and making things more locally,” she says.

The details change from place to place, but broadly, transition groups seek to remake their streets into food producing, low-energy, low-emission, tight-knit neighbourhoods.

In Darebin, which traverses suburbs from Alphington to Reservoir, the residents have turned their minds to their pantries. Among other things, they’ve formed a vegie and dry goods co-op, visited local growers and sellers, held a forum on food security in Preston and begun planning urban orchards with the council.

Australia’s first transition town was the Sunshine Coast. This year, residents there presented an Energy Descent Action Plan to their council. The plan sketches the region in an energy-constrained future, spanning issues from household efficiency through to transportation and the economy.

That kind of preparation is also being championed by the Municipal Association of Victoria. The association has created a program for local governments, called ‘Councils And Communities in Transition’, which includes energy descent planning. So far, 20 Victorian councils are taking part; the association is aiming for every council to be inducted by 2012.

Janet Millington, from Transition Sunshine Coast, says that while councils have a role to play in educating and supporting their residents, it’s important that local people fast track change themselves.

“We can’t wait for government – it’s going to be too slow,” she says. “We can’t do it individually – it’s not going to be enough. But if we work together in communities, it might be enough and it might be in time.”

Ms Millington says the scale of the challenge before us depends on the speed and severity of both climate change and the decline of non-renewable resources.

“Transition initiatives are about getting people to think, ‘Hey, what do we do when all these things hit?’” she says. “We’re all living on the same finite, self-regulating system. If we push it too far, it’s going to regulate us right out of the picture.”

Read this on The Age website. 

Fans and ventilation will take the heat out of your bills.

Our electricity consumption spikes on hot summer days. But with utility bills soaring and climate change pressing, it’s time to turn off the air conditioner. There are cheaper ways to keep your home cool.

Andreas Sederof, from sustainable housing design firm Sunpower Design, says carefully planned cross-ventilation is a vital part of a well functioning home. It’ll help you harness each cool change on a stifling day and every fresh breeze in the evening.

If you’re planning to build or renovate, Mr Sederof’s first tip is that all windows are not equal. “To be effective, your windows must be sufficiently openable,” he says.

For example, awning windows, which hinge at the top, don’t allow as much breeze as casement windows, which hinge at the side like a door.

“Casements expose the whole opening of the window to ventilation,” he says. “In Melbourne, most cool changes come from the south and southwest. You can get the windows to act like chutes for the cooling breezes to enter the house.”

Mr Sederof’s second principle is to give the wind a free run of your home. “The building’s spaces should be organised in such a way that it allows cross-flow ventilation. It’s best to have the ventilating doors and windows opposite one another – like a good aerodynamicist, you need the air flow to be as unrestricted as possible,” he says.

According to Sustainability Victoria’s Air Movement guide, providing an outlet for the wind, as well as an inlet, creates wind speeds up to eleven times greater than only opening an inlet window. Larger outlet spaces to the north allow a greater volume of air to enter from the south.

Even if the southerly change hasn’t yet arrived, you can still passively cool your home each evening by venting the day’s heat.

“In summertime we often get still, clammy nights,” Mr Sederof says. “That’s when openable roof glazing, highlight windows or thermal chimneys can be very effective. Hot air rises, so it’s easy to evacuate. Cooling towers like those have been around for centuries in the Middle-East.”

When you open both a low window and a roof window (once the temperature has fallen outside) hot air will flow out and cooler air will enter. “If you’ve got low windows opposite small fern gardens or vegetation, you’ll replace that hot air with slightly colder air from the plants’ transpiration,” he says.

Ceiling or roof-mounted exhaust fans work on the same principle as high windows. They’ll extract hotter air from high in the room and draw fresh air through open windows. They can be either powered or passively operated. Make sure you choose models that have covers or dampers, or seal automatically if they’re not being used, so you don’t lose warmth in winter.

If your home doesn’t have good cross-ventilation, and you can’t retrofit it, ceiling fans are the next best bet. In hot weather, fans can make you feel a few degrees cooler. Mr Sederof recommends one fan for every 10 to 12 square metres.

“Fans rely on evaporative cooling. The air moving over your skin is what makes you feel cool,” he says. “But you have to buy decent quality ones – if you’re spending less than $200, they’re probably not good enough.”