It’s hard for extensions to buck the consumption trend.

RENOVATING is stressful. Typically, you’ve got to make a boxful of decisions you’ve never made before and hand over fistfuls of cash you don’t really have.

And if you want to reduce your environmental footprint while you’re at it, the process becomes even more complex.

With that in mind, how many “green renovations” end up very green?

In a recent study, Cecily Maller and her colleagues at RMIT’s Centre for Design interviewed people who considered their renovation to be green, and toured their homes.

The participants had one thing in common: by and large, their houses got bigger. Usually, the renovators chose to expand living areas and kitchens, revamp existing bathrooms and add new bathrooms. Some added a second floor.

“People were deeply concerned about the environment and really wanted to improve their house’s performance, but at the same time, they weren’t always cognisant of the fact they were expanding the size of their home,” she says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The researchers don’t have stats to compare water and energy use before and after the renovations, but Dr Maller says popular design features, such as open plan and indoor-outdoor living areas, can make it hard to consume less. Larger spaces usually require more heating than smaller ones, even if the heating is efficient. More bathrooms can mean more showers, or longer ones.

Dr Maller, who leads the Place and Health research area, says the renovators were well informed and genuinely dedicated to efficiency and sustainability. One couple went to great lengths to salvage all the timber for their wood-panelled walls.

But on deeper questioning, the researchers discovered other reasons too. People wanted to make their home brighter, more comfortable, and larger, to accommodate growing families.

Overall, retrofitted homes are subject to escalating patterns of consumption reflected in society at large – such as expectations of greater convenience and privacy, extra space for more appliances and possessions, and a narrow indoor temperature range all year round.

In new housing estates, in particular, Dr Maller says, bathrooms and kitchens are multiplying. “There’s often a second kitchen outside that replicates many of the same appliances and even has heating.”

Those trends are hard to resist, especially when people worry about resale value. “One thing we noticed is that people really love that intersection between indoors and outdoors. There’s a point where fashion often wins out over sustainability,” she says.

She says that the narrative around green housing must emphasise restraint and thriftiness, rather than bigger and brighter technological solutions alone. It must also incorporate the notion of resource stewardship and recognise households as producers as well as consumers.

“We need to look beyond technology, to other things that people do in their home to save resources, such as sharing and swapping things with neighbours rather than everybody buying their own. Quite often people do it without thinking, like passing on children’s clothes.”

Dr Maller said that the most successful green renovations could include features designed to “buck the trend”. In her study, one of the interviewees chose not to install a bath in her redesigned, smaller, bathroom.

“Despite cajoling from friends, who even invited her over to have a bath at their place, she designed it out of her house, because she was adamant that water was such a precious commodity,” she says.

Read this article at The Age online

Are extensions always about more? Is it possible to renovate your home in a way that helps you consume less – or is ‘retrofitting’ a better word for doing that?

Despite the absence of hard numbers, I’m persuaded by the academics’ findings. If you’ve renovated, what were the results: more stuff, or less? Big debt, or simplicity?

Dr Maller focuses on the consumptive impact of our social practices – including patterns of cleaning, washing and convenience. I’d particularly like to hear about any examples of renovations or design features that re-shaped those practices. 

Airing your dirty laundry is best for everyone.

FOR over 150 years after British colonisation, Mondays in Australian households were reserved for one particular chore. The day after the Christian Sabbath was, according to historian Graeme Davison, “almost universally observed as washing day”.

Professor Davison researched our laundering rituals (among other things) for his chapter in the 2008 book, Troubled Waters: Confronting the water crisis in Australian cities.

“In the mid-nineteenth century, the wash for a large family could occupy the washerwoman from early morning till well into the evening,” he wrote. “The laundry for an average family could require, in washing, boiling and rinsing, as much as 50 gallons [227 litres] of water.

“Most people, however, owned many fewer changes of clothes than we do, and changed them less frequently… Men wore business shirts several times, changing the detachable collars each day, before washing the shirt itself at the end of the week.”

By the end of World War II only two out of every hundred Melbourne households owned a washing machine. But that changed fast, Professor Davison said: by the late ’70s, it was nine out of ten.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

These days, clothes washing accounts for about 15 per cent of household water use – about the same proportion as a century ago, even though water consumption, per capita, has more than doubled since then.

What we do in the laundry is usually hidden from public view. For her Masters thesis at University of Melbourne, sustainable fashion researcher Tullia Jack set about getting people talking.

She got thirty people (including herself) to wear a pair of jeans at least five days a week for three months, without washing them. The results, she says, were unremarkable: stains disappeared, there were no nasty odours, and no one noticed.

Earlier this year, in an exhibition called Nobody Was Dirty, the worn jeans were pinned to the walls at the National Gallery of Victoria for all to see, and smell.

One of Ms Jack’s motivations was evidence about the impacts of clothing, from production all the way to disposal. “When you look at all the different stages in the life cycle of a garment, the use phase – washing and drying – has the biggest environmental impact,” she says. “And the way we wash our clothes isn’t based on a scientific imperative – it’s more of a social construct.”

Early in her research, she came across an experiment conducted by Canadian student Josh Le, who wore the same pair of jeans for 15 months without washing them. The bacteria count two weeks after laundering was the same as at the end of the 15-month stretch.

The people who took part in Ms Jack’s study reported that they’d wash their clothes less often than they had beforehand – they felt freer to make up their own mind about whether or not the clothes needed it.

As a guide to reducing laundry, Ms Jack has devised a clothes-cleaning hierarchy. Once you take a garment off, hang it in a well-ventilated place. You can try freshening clothes by leaving them in the steamy bathroom while you shower, or hanging them outside in the sunshine.

Next, she suggests spot cleaning with moist cloth to remove visible dirt; then hand washing in cold water using biodegradable detergent. Last, and least, once you’ve got a full load ready, wash in cold water and dry on the line. 

Read this article at The Age online

Learn to repair old wares at new workshops.

LAST year, April Seymore and her friends got talking about the state of the world. They dissected our disconnection with the way things work, criticised consumer products built to break, and bemoaned the all the stuff that’s needlessly, thoughtlessly tossed into landfill.

And they decided to do something about it. They started Fix It, an open network of events where people gather to repair everyday household objects.

Ms Seymore says most goods “magically work for us”, until all of a sudden, they don’t.

“When they break we’re a bit confounded by it,” she says. “Often that means they get dusty in the garage, or go into the bin, or to an opshop, which also might not have the capacity to repair them. It costs charities a lot of money to put all that stuff into landfill.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The idea behind Fix It is that anyone and everyone can hold their own event – you just have to invite some friends and their broken knick-knacks, and nut it out together.

“Fixing gives you great insight into how things work,” Ms Seymore says. “So we think it’s fun, but it also makes you smarter. It can save you money too, because you can extend the life of household objects.”

She says many attendees are surprised by their mending capacities – and by how much they can teach others. “People take things for granted. They’ll say, ‘I have no skills, but, oh yes, I can patch a fly-screen,’ or ‘I’ve only salvaged a couple of lamps’.”

Tinkering has hit the Zeitgeist, she says. In the Netherlands, Repair Cafes are running in dozens of locations. In London, the Restart Project is agitating for repair in the information technology industry, while in New York, the Fixers’ Collective meets once a month.

Closer to home, Melbournians can learn to mend and refashion their outdated and busted jewellery at ‘The Treasury’, the monthly workshops run by jeweller and artist Emma Grace (next one is August 25).

In Sydney, members of the Bower Reuse and Repair Centre in Marrackville mend, reinvent and re-sell pre-loved goods. The co-operative also holds public workshops on skills such as upholstery and bike mechanics.

If you want to see Fix It in action, there’ll be a stall at the Gasworks Art Park farmers’ market, in South Melbourne, on the third Saturday of each month from August to November. There’s also one coming up in Preston in late August (see the Fix It Facebook site for details).

“There’s a real movement now,” Ms Seymore says. “People are interested in reducing waste, learning how things work and being more self-sufficient.”

Her mother is a carpenter and a seamstress, among other practical things. And, so, as long as she can remember, the younger Ms Seymore has been repairing and inventing things with timber and textiles too.

Even so, she always learns something new from other people. “I’m a fixer, but I’m an aspiring fixer as well. I’m always adding more tools to my Swiss Army knife, so to speak.

“It appeals to our childhood sense of wonder – taking things apart and seeing whether you can stick them back together in the same way, or in a more exciting way. I think there’s a lot of good stuff that can come out of it, for our brains and our bodies, and for our community.”

Read this article at the Age online

Our expectations of comfort, cleanliness and convenience are on the rise.

ONLY four decades ago, there were almost no air conditioners in Australian households. Now they’re in two out of every three.

“More people are using air conditioning more frequently, and they’re putting them in more rooms of their houses,” says Yolande Strengers from RMIT’s Centre for Design.

She says that this remarkable colonisation is not only about the technology itself, but also about the way we’ve adapted to it. Now, our buildings are designed for air conditioning. Many houses no longer include features such as eaves or cross ventilation that help you get along without it. And in our offices, we’ve become accustomed to dressing the same way all year round.

All those things contribute to a change in our expectations of indoor comfort. And the shift is happening in a way that ratchets up our energy consumption.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Typically, green groups and governments try to reduce energy and water use by providing information and rebates, and hoping we’ll make rational decisions in response. There’s another way of thinking about these issues – one that doesn’t view them as matters of individual choice, but rather, as social practices.

One of the most influential thinkers in this field is Elizabeth Shove, from Lancaster University. In her book, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the Social Organisation of Normality, she wrote that much environmentally significant consumption is invisible, bound up in our daily routines.

Professor Shove analysed trends in the way we use heating and cooling, the frequency of showering and laundering, and the proliferation of time-saving gadgets and habits. She found they’d changed radically, and that many of our new expectations involved higher resource consumption (although that isn’t inevitable).

At RMIT, Dr Strengers leads a research area called Beyond Behaviour Change. “The standard message is that you can just go on as you are, but turn your lights off and change your showerhead,” she says. “But while we’ve been saying that, the general international trend is that the resource intensity of a lot of domestic practices is still going up.”

For that to change we need to think not only about the efficiency of our current patterns of consumption, but also about the patterns themselves.

“Even something as simple as shortening a shower can become ineffectual if we start showering more often, or showering for different reasons, or we build more spa baths. Those practices are always changing and at the moment they’re changing in more resource-intensive ways,” she says.

Dr Strengers says that over the long-term, many “things people think are non-negotiable are actually really malleable”.

“When you really start talking with people about history – even what they did when they were young – the changes in our expectations are incredible,” she says. “For example, showering once a day has only been common since the early 20^th century.”

On air conditioning, both Professor Shove (PDF) and Dr Strengers have written about a Japanese campaign called CoolBiz, launched in 2005. In government offices, thermostats were set at 28 degrees in summer. The environment ministry sponsored fashion shows promoting looser-fitting clothing – open necked shirts and short sleeves.

The initiative reduces cooling costs and energy usage immediately, Shove observed. But in the long run, it could establish an expectation that buildings should be designed so that clothing has a key role in indoor comfort.

Read this article at the Age online