There’s more to recycling than steel cans and glass bottles.

AUTHOR and science journalist Tanya Ha often asks this question:  What do you do in you own home to help the environment?

“Recycling is the first thing people say,” she says. “We’ve been doing it and we’re proud of it. To some degree, it’s second nature.”

National Recycling Week starts tomorrow, coordinated by Planet Ark. There’ll be challenges, swaps and workshops in schools and council areas around the country, and “file flings” in offices to encourage paper recycling.

A recent study released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 98 percent of households recycle or reuse items around home.

That’s something to celebrate, Ms Ha says, but not something to be satisfied with. (Take aluminium cans: we recycle two out of every three; the Germans, 96 out of 100.)

“We’ve gone into autopilot on day-to-day recycling. We could improve, especially away from home, but generally we do it pretty well. But the ground is shifting under us. There’s a lot more we can do,” she says.

To coincide with Recycling Week, Ms Ha and Planet Ark have released a report called Second Nature, which tracks the past and present and speculates on the future of recycling in Australia.

“The waste we produce says so much about our society: what things we buy, what things we value and what we don’t,” she says.

Normal practices are always changing. In the nineteenth century, rag and bone collectors sold household rags to paper mills, and kitchen bones to makers of buttons, soap, glue and gelatine. Until the 1960s, glass drink bottles were all refillable.

Ms Ha says our reasons for recycling have also changed, from concern about sanitation in the eighteenth century, and the need for thrift during the war eras, to worries about landfill capacity in the ’60s and ’70s, when consumption and single-use packaging boomed.

“Now the pressing need is climate change,” she explains, “and the other motivation will be resource security.”

They’re big concerns. Ms Ha says we need a shift in mindset, away from a linear, “cradle-to-grave” approach, and into cyclical, “cradle-to-cradle” thinking.

Organic waste is the perfect illustration. In 2006-07, material such as food scraps, paper, cardboard, wood and garden clippings comprised nearly two-thirds of everything that went into landfill (PDF).

“In landfill conditions, it produces methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. But biodegradable waste is such a useful resource; we need to capture it and put it back into the soil,” she says.

The other challenge is e-waste, such as computers, televisions and batteries. Around Australia, there are 22 million disused mobile phones and accessories languishing in the dark.

Inside are precious resources: 1 tonne of obsolete mobile phones (not including their batteries) can yield 300 grams of gold, over 3 kilograms of silver, about 140 kilograms of copper, among other things.

Until the end of the year, MobileMuster, the industry-funded recycling program, is promoting a “memory muster”. Post or drop-off your old mobile and they’ll send you prints of your six favourite, forgotten photos.

Remember, however, that avoiding consumption is better than recycling the results. Do you really need that new phone, TV or gadget?

With the race on to reduce carbon emissions, Ms Ha says, just worrying about recycling “is like a swimmer just focussing on the tumble turns, not on the laps”.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Building it yourself can help you consume less and live more.

IN 2008, Richard Telford bought a small block of land in Seymour, an hour north of Melbourne.

He dismantled the run-down weatherboard bungalow, and carefully stored the materials for reuse. Over the course of a year, the former white-collar worker laboured full-time to build a new home for his young family.

This year, Abdallah House – named for its street – was a finalist in the Housing Industry Association’s GreenSmart Awards.

The 100–square metre, three-bedroom home is largely self-reliant in water and energy. With two toddlers, he and his partner Kunie Yoshimoto use about one-eighth the electricity of an average home.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“People have become detached from where and how they live,” Mr Telford says. “The owner-building process really connected us with what’s involved in a house – the effort to create it and the energy and water we consume. It’s like growing your own food: the more involved you are, the greater appreciation you have for the quality.”

It also gave him control over the way materials were used and re-used.

“In a typical house, several skips go to landfill. We threw almost nothing away. We used things that would be considered waste, and transformed them into something quite beautiful,” he says.

He didn’t do it alone. Mr Telford teamed up with Peter Lockyer, an architect and builder who makes a living helping owner-builders with the nuts and bolts of designing and constructing a dwelling.

The main environmental benefit of doing it yourself, Mr Lockyer says, comes down to size. “Their homes tend to be smaller. You assess your needs more clearly – you don’t build a separate theatre or extra living rooms you’ll never use.”

Over three decades, he’s worked on about 100 passive solar homes of this kind. He remains enthralled by the creativity that emerges when people, with no special skills or experience, work slowly and steadily on something they care about.

“I’m still excited by the hands-on process of people creating their own space,” he says. “Building can be fun. It’s an enriching part of life, not just a transaction to get a product. They’re creating more than a backdrop for a plasma screen.”

He offers a warning too: projects are more likely to take years than months, and that can be stressful for relationships. Also, many banks are cautious in offering loans to owner-builders.

His advice is to make sure you’ve got someone on your side – a registered builder – who can help you avoid the bumps. The Building Commission provides links to tips, training and a useful information kit (PDF), which details your obligations and the required applications.

For Mr Telford, becoming an owner-builder was about choosing a way of life. The land cost $54,000 and the budget for the new house was just $100,000. With the help of the generous government grants then available, the couple have already paid off their mortgage. They have an abundant food garden, very few costs, and a lot of freedom to decide how they’ll spend their time.

Before all this, Mr Telford worked in advertising. Now, he does his own publishing, including a permaculture calendar, and writes about Abdallah House on his blog. “I’m using those skills to promote things I believe in,” he explains.

“I wanted to show people that you can do it without getting in debt for the rest of your life.”

Read this article at The Age online

A new project proves what’s possible with local knowledge.

KENNY and Tammy live on Ballarat’s eastern edge. They cultivate a veggie patch, keep chickens, geese, quail and bees, and stay comfortable in their super-insulating straw bale home. If that weren’t enough, Kenny has designed and built an aquaponics system, which grows fish and veggies together.

They’ve got knowledge and experiences to share, but how?

The couple’s story is now part of the Smart Living Ballarat project. Since February, dozens of volunteers have been staffing a shopfront stocked with the expertise of locals who’ve reduced their environmental impact and improved their quality of life.

The information covers five themes: home energy, water, food, transport and local environment. There are displays on each of them, covering insulation, lighting, flooring, paint, glazing and furniture, among others. There’s a model of a passive solar house designed for the region, and directories for local food suppliers, building expertise and materials.

All the information is replicated on the Smart Living Ballarat website, and there are regular events and workshops in the space, from bike maintenance and solar hot water to LED lighting and permaculture.

The project was conceived in 2009, at a time when the drought had completely dried out Lake Wendouree, the large artificial lake to the city’s west. Household water restrictions were set at Stage 4.

Local environment group Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions – one of the centre’s partners – wrote that there was “strong scientific evidence that climate change is directly affecting the Ballarat region”, with warmer and drier conditions and long-term predictions for more hot days.

“Climate change was starting to affect our community very personally,” explains Sophie Akers, the centre’s project manager.

“A lot of people got their heads together and wanted to create a place where we could engage our community in an independent, non-commercial, non-government way, and to have a place where we could talk about sustainable living.

“It was clear that we needed to offer something in all aspects of a household – everything from the natural environment through to transport, the built environment to the food we eat.”

The centre itself offers a working model. It’s housed at the front of the city’s old Mining Exchange building, which opened in 1889 and fast became one of the world’s busiest stock exchanges. But within a few decades it had shut down and the last gold mines were closed.

This time, behind its tall, arched windows, the volunteers are building another kind of wealth, one that consciously aims to avoid the boom and bust cycle.

Part of the project’s funding from Sustainability Victoria was dedicated to retrofitting the shop with the kinds of energy-saving techniques that would be on display. A solar photovoltaic system was installed on the roof and it produces much more electricity than the centre uses.

Above all, however, the local stories and expertise are crucial to the project’s approach, both in the shopfront and on its website. Ms Akers says it’s always influential for visitors to see close-to-home, real-life examples.

“People can talk local to local, and see what’s happening around town,” she says. “They can even go out to people’s places and see what they’re doing.

“In regional areas especially, it’s essential that people get to see those local stories. Our communities really look to each other for help, learning, support, and leadership.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Environmental and economic pressures combine to boost activity at home.

PERMACULTURE founder David Holmgren grew up in the suburbs – in Fremantle – in the 50s and 60s. As a young teenager, he concluded that the lifestyle he observed was the most wasteful that had ever existed.

Now, however, he regards our post-war subdivisions as fertile territory for the relocalisation movement: places where people could grow much more of their own food, work at home and meet their needs while consuming much fewer resources.

Why the change in perspective? Unfortunately, Mr Holmgren explains, it’s because “we’ve moved so far in the wrong direction in those succeeding decades”.

Earlier this year, he spoke at the Wheeler Centre on “retrofitting the suburbs for a resilient future”. (You can also find this video of his talk on the Centre’s website.)

In it, he sums up our neighbourhoods by way of the fictional – and often amusing – happenings at four properties on “Aussie Street”. He tracks the residents from the “golden age of suburbia” (1950s), through “rising affluence and additions” (1960s and 1970s), “aging and infill” (1990s), to the more speculative possibilities of a “permaculture retrofit” (2000s) and “the second great depression” (2015).

His thinking challenges the notion that higher urban density is the answer to reducing our environmental impact.

In the 1950s, the residents of Aussie Street have small houses and large gardens; most tend vegie patches, fruit trees and chickens. One couple, Mario and Angela, who live at number 4, even keep a goat.

As the decades pass, however, food production diminishes, the dwellings are extended, gardens and driveways concreted, and one block is subdivided for townhouses. All the while, there are fewer people living in the homes, and they spend less time there.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In a recent essay explaining his analysis, published on the Simplicity Institute website, Mr Holmgren argues that instead of re-building a denser city, we should aim to adapt what we’ve already got.

“Even with a growing economy, the building stock and infrastructure turns over slowly,” he says. “In 50 years, short of catastrophe, the city will be largely filled with the things that are there now. But within that, people can change their behaviour quite rapidly.”

Aussie Street begins to change in the 2000s, when a young couple and their baby move in. They set up a backyard nursery and an intensive vegie patch, and sell their seedlings and greens. A friend and his parents buy next door; they knock down the fence, take in a boarder and retrofit the house for passive solar gain.

With an eye on the economic strife in the USA and much of Europe, Mr Holmgren also extended his scenario to 2015, and addressed some of the financial coping strategies people could choose here as well.

The key change, he says, is to shift from seeking high incomes, to reducing your costs. That’s what people naturally do when times are tougher: more people live under the same roof, and meet more of their own needs. On Aussie Street, the goats return to number 4.

“You can minimise your costs by slowing down, going fewer places and being more productive with the underutilised fixed assets you’ve already got,” he says.

“People in Australia have a sense that really big change is coming. Every household knows their own situation best, so people should think hard about how they can seriously plan for the future.”

Read this article at the Age online

The speed paradox: how cars steal our time, money, climate and health.

WHICH one goes faster, a car or a bicycle? It’s obvious, right? In cities, says Paul Tranter, it’s the bike.

Dr Tranter is an Associate Professor of Geography at UNSW Canberra. This week, he’s speaking at the Bike Futures Conference about his research on “effective speed”. The conference, run by the Bicycle Network, will be held from Wednesday to Friday at the MCG.

His argument goes like this: imagine you live in a remote village and it takes you an hour to walk to the river and gather water everyday. To save time, you invent a spring-powered contraption to pump it for you. It works like a charm, but there’s just one catch – it takes over an hour to wind the spring.

“In our society, the equivalent of winding the spring is the time we spend at work to pay for our cars, and the registration, insurance, fuel, parking and tolls,” he says.

A car’s effective speed includes not only the direct commuting time, but also the hours we spend earning money to pay for it. According to the RACV’s estimated vehicle operating costs, even the most frugal new car will set you back over $110 per week (and that doesn’t include parking or tolls).

For cyclists, these costs are negligible, and for pedestrians, non-existent.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In a chapter for a forthcoming book, City Cycling, published by MIT Press, Dr Tranter estimated effective speeds in several cities round the world. (He chose locations within 15 kilometres of each CBD.)

For drivers of a low-cost car who earn an average wage, Melbourne and Sydney clocked in at about 11 kilometres per hour. London drivers crawl along at less than 7, while Nairobi drivers inch forward at less than walking pace: 2 kilometres per hour.

“Depending on how broadly you think about it, you could also include costs of the impacts on pollution and our health,” Dr Tranter says. “All those external costs are hard to estimate, but everything from obesity to climate change are consequences, in part, of mass car usage.”

To bring the concept home, Dr Tranter outlines two scenarios for parents. If you’re pressed for time, should you drive your kids to school, or walk or cycle with them?

“An average driver would take longer per day earning the money to pay for their car than it would take them to walk their children to the local school,” he says.

“And there’s more: once you lock yourself in to driving your child to school, then you’ve got to drive them to sport, to visit friends, to the cinema. You could even argue that you’re more likely to have to drive them to the doctor or the psychologist, because they’re going to be fatter, sicker and sadder.”

He acknowledges that not everyone can easily make this trade-off. People with long commutes or inflexible hours don’t have a choice. In part, that’s a symptom of a sprawling car-based society: fewer jobs and amenities are within walking or pedalling distance.

But equipped with this different understanding of driving costs, many people could give up their second car.

“That’s the big possibility for householders, even in outer suburbs, as long as you’re close to the train line, or you work within cycling distance,” Dr Tranter says. “That could save you between $5000 and $20000 every year.”

Read this article at The Age online