Michael Green

Writer and producer

Star ratings on the ground

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

HUNDREDS of thousands of new homes across the country are not performing at their promised energy efficiency rating, forcing residents to use up to double the predicted energy required for heating and cooling, experts say.

Research by air-tightness testing company Air Barrier Technologies has shown that air leakage in new homes is five to 10 times worse than expected under the star-rating scheme.

This means that an average five-star home is likely to perform only to a three-star level, potentially doubling energy bills for residents.

About 40,000 new homes are built in Victoria each year, and all must adhere to the five-star standard. This will rise to six stars from May.

But a group of industry players, including Henley Homes, who have been lobbying state and federal government and building regulators to crack down on the air leakage problem, say unless more action is taken, customers cannot be confident their homes meet the stated star rating.

“At the moment there’s an assumption that houses are built to a far tighter standard than what we believe they are in reality,” Adam Selvay, Henley Homes energy and sustainability specialist, told The Sunday Age last week.

The question of builder liability was raised in a meeting with the Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and the Australian Building Codes Board in April last year.

Following that meeting, Terry Mahoney, president of the Air Infiltration and Ventilation Association of Australia, emailed other attendees, as well as federal government ministers and senior public servants, criticising officials for failing to respond to the issues discussed.

“It became apparent that no amount of scientific evidence, or global best practice comparisons or safety and health risk concerns raised by the visiting group, would engender any action or urgency from either the [Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency] or the [Australian Building Codes Board] at this time,” he wrote.

Mr Mahoney noted the attendees’ view that there is “overwhelming evidence” that the current star rating method “proves grossly inaccurate when constructed homes are performance tested”.

Bruce Rowse, from building efficiency consultants CarbonetiX, said air gaps are common around doors, light fixtures, window- and door-frames, and places where pipes or cables enter the home.

“Sealing is very important and to do it properly is really laborious. And there’s no inspection for it,” he said.

He also expressed concern that the regulatory regime doesn’t ensure insulation is adequately installed. “The building inspector has no idea of what insulation actually goes into the walls,” he said. “It’s also very difficult to validate exactly how well the ceiling is insulated.”

Victorian Building Commissioner Tony Arnel denied there was a systemic problem with air leakage standards or insulation in five-star homes. He maintained that an auditing process had consistently demonstrated that new homes complied with regulations.

“But building is not necessarily always a perfect science. We did some research two years ago with Air Barrier Technologies and that did tell us that there was potentially an issue with draughts and gaps that we needed to continue to work with industry to ensure that quality is met,” he said.

Mr Arnel said if testing proved a home did not meet its star rating due to building deficiencies, the owner could take legal action against the builder “because presumably it hasn’t been built to the right specification”.

Housing Industry Association building and environment director Kristin Brookfield said the association was not aware of any specific research on air leakage but acknowledged that a building’s energy efficiency is affected if it is not properly sealed.

“It’s important that this is seen as an issue about the rating tools,” she said. “This is not an issue about the actual construction of the homes.”

Lin Enright, from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said that concerns had been raised with the Department of Climate Change about air infiltration, but no complaints or inquiries had been brought to the attention of the consumer watchdog.

The issue was privately championed last year by former Victorian Planning Minister, Justin Madden. In July, he wrote to the federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, requesting that the Australian Building Codes Board consider testing for air leakage to ensure greater energy efficiency of housing and other properties.

Read this article at The Age online

Down to earth

In Community development, Environment, The Big Issue on

Communes are back. Actually, they never went away. They’ve shaken the naked-hippie image to offer a practical alternative to modern challenges.


ONE idyllic Friday afternoon – like many afternoons at the Homeland community – an impromptu parents’ circle formed outside Rose West and Kai Tipping’s small, rented house.


Rose knelt on the grass in her long skirt, while their elder daughter, Mali, home from primary school, alternately strode and sprinted around the open space with her friends. Their other daughter, Persia – two years old and possessed of an altogether wicked zest for life, laboured indiscriminately in the vegetable patch.


Two years ago, the young couple had left the city for the country. They sought a manageable, affordable lifestyle and more freedom and safety for their daughters. They found a commune. And in that, they’re not alone.


TWENTY-FOUR years before Rose and Kai made their life-altering move, Phil Bourne’s family moved to Seymour, 100km north of Melbourne, to start a communal living project with another like-minded family.


The small community was named, aptly, Commonground. Over the years other families have come and gone; the community hasn’t yet grown as Bourne had hoped. But the original two families, the core group, remain, and have since formed links with others through Cohousing Australia – a hub for communal living projects, which Bourne chairs.


Living enmeshed with others isn’t always ideal. There are times when, as he says, Bourne would have preferred to be a “hermit”. But he still feels that, ultimately, it’s worth it. “It’s what we term a high-input, high reward lifestyle,” he explains.


Recently, Bourne and the old guard of communal dwellers have been sensing that people are, once again, beginning to see value in their way of life. “I don’t know whether we’re kidding ourselves, but when the people who’ve been in this scene a long time get together, we’re convinced there’s a new energy around,” he says. “People are looking at what’s happening with the world and they’re hungry to find other options.


“In current times of climate change, peak oil and social isolation, when the single person household is the fastest growing housing sector, we think it’s time for the next wave of intentional communities,” Bourne says. “But to get from dreaming it to doing it is not easy.”


In Australia, rural landsharing communities flourished throughout the 1970s. After the 10-day Aquarius festival in Nimbin in 1973 – often described as Australia’s version of Woodstock – a number of attendees stayed on and started utopian communities throughout northern NSW.


The movement was inspired by New Age and simple-living ideas, together with concern about spiking oil prices, environmental degradation and the limits to economic growth.


“The intentional communities of the ’60s and ’70s had a lot of good intentions, but the application was vague,” Bourne concedes. “In many ways, it was downtrodden by the mainstream as hippie nonsense – a percentage of which had truth to it and a percentage of which missed the point.”


The Homeland community was founded in 1977, on a former dairy farm half-an-hour by car from Bellingen, an artsy town on NSW’s mid-north coast. Now, about three-dozen adults and children live there. The members aren’t allowed to own any land, but they can own their home. Each adult pays $30 per week in rent to cover upkeep on the extensive shared facilities, including the recreation house, guests’ cottage, laundry, shower block, barns, orchards and festival fields.


The community was modelled on the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in Scotland, famous for mystical gardeners who grew supernaturally large cabbages on sandy soil. But the connection vanished in the early 1980s, as the overseas philosophy became obscured by the haze of marijuana smoke closer to home.


Like all communities, membership and motivation has ebbed and flowed. “Five years ago,” one long-term Homeland resident explains, “we were lamenting that we were becoming a geriatric farm.” Then a number of young families started moving onto the land.


AT Homeland, the afternoon continued on its comfortably unplanned course. A friend of Rose and Kai dropped in with his toddlers, and two other young mums from up the hill happened by with their daughters. “There are no play dates on Homeland,” Rose explained later. “You don’t ring up the other mother, organise a week in advance and go to a cafe and spend money. It just happens.”


While the children whooped, the adults spoke about placentas and sleeping patterns, the uncomfortable crevices that ticks find, and the humility required when asking someone else to remove them.


It was an earthy conversation, not an astral one: more permaculture than counter-culture.

 

IN all likelihood, this kind of practical exchange wouldn’t be uncommon among latter day communal dwellers. “You don’t get naked hippies running around the hills any more,” says Dr Bill Metcalf, a ‘communitarian’ scholar at Griffith University who has published several books on the subject.


“A lot of people see communal living as a very sensible option,” Metcalf continues. “They aren’t looking at it in the utopian sense – it’s just a much more sane way to live in a rural area. The interest is moving to a strata of society that wouldn’t have considered it 20 years ago, because it was seen as too outrageous.”


Metcalf says there are hundreds of intentional communities throughout Australia, from spiritual groups to survivalists, nudist colonies to eco-villages.


“No matter where you go, we’ve got these communities. Some are very upmarket, some very downmarket.”


For two decades, Metcalf has been working on an encyclopaedia of communities established in Australia before the ‘baby boomer’ generation. When he began, he expected it to be a brief undertaking. But, he says, “I keep finding new ones faster than I can research them. In every state there are amazing examples: there are lesbian separatist communes from the 1870s; groups who believed in a single tax; nudist groups; vegetarians. You name it, they’re out there.”

 

JUST as the kinds of communities and structures change over time, utopian dreams are also tempered from within. Close to Rose and Kai’s house, along a short walking track, is an open-walled barn, set among small beds of flowers and vegetables. It is home to Jacque Flavell, who has lived on Homeland for 22 years.


“What we’ve gradually come to realise is that you don’t have to try and work it all out so you love everyone,” she said. “When you see someone and you don’t really want to talk to them, it starts to make you sick. Eventually I think: ‘Well, I better do something about myself. I may not get to love them, but I better not let them give me an ulcer.’”


Flavell arrived on the community as a single mother with two young children. She had been a cabaret dancer, including a stint with the Moulin Rouge in Paris, but decided to radically simplify her life. She raised her children on the property without a car, avoiding machines wherever possible.


“I laugh now, when I look back,” she said. “I thought I would come here and learn from these much more evolved beings, but they were just like us. We’re just a bunch of people who are trying to figure something out. I still have things to learn.”


Later in the afternoon, Kai arrived home after teaching a samba drumming class to school kids in another town. He has the broad shoulders of someone who’s grown up on the land but, until recently, little of the practical know-how. (“I’m terribly scared of snakes,” he confided.) He and Rose, like Flavell, both hail from cities.


“I’m reaping the benefits of the work other people have put into the community, and it’s been a blessing,” he said. “The relationships are more complicated – I’m still getting used to the protocols. If you see an old fridge, you can’t just throw it out. It takes a long time to get anything done.”

The couple are clear about the obstacles associated with life this far from the mainstream, be they snakes and ticks, car-reliance or disputes with ex-members. Even so, their choice makes sense.


“If you look around the world and throughout history, I think people have lived like this most of the time,” Rose said. “When I travelled overseas this is how I saw people living: they pool resources and they share work, and a big part of that shared work is raising kids.”


Mali entered the room with a present for her mother: a soft, crocheted bird she had made at school. Rose murmured her approval by clucking like a chook, but the child protested. “Oh, it’s a bluebird,” Rose said. “It just looks a bit like a hen.” Unfussed, Mali raced off again, after asking permission to go to the common house with another child.


“All the faces around here, I know them all, and they’re my friends,” Rose continued. “I hope to spend many years together raising our kids and doing that all in a beautiful environment, with mountains in the background and a river flowing in front. I can’t ask for more than that.”

 

DIY community


IF you want to start an intentional community, don’t be naive: expect conflict and learn how to get over it. That’s the advice from Dr Bill Metcalf, gleaned from decades researching and living on communities.


“None of them run smoothly,” says Metcalf. “And the vast majority of people who want to create a community never succeed.”


The flip side, however, is that at their best, communities are socially enriching, environmentally sound and cheap to live on. “Almost invariably, people who grow up in intentional communities say they had a wonderful childhood.”


There are some practical challenges. Wedged by strict council regulations and steep property prices, people often have trouble finding suitable land. Also, properties classed as multiple occupancies usually can’t be subdivided, and without the security of individual title, banks take a lot of convincing to approve loans. Increasingly, would-be communities opt for strata title, rather than a cooperative, corporation or tenants-in-common structure.


“The old model, where a few hippies would pool their dole cheques and put illegal shacks on a clapped out dairy farm – those days are well and truly gone,” says Metcalf. “Now it requires elaborate financial management. It can cost millions of dollars by the time you get something operating with roads and facilities.”


Rural communities aren’t the only option. Phil Bourne, from Cohousing Australia, is promoting an urban hybrid model, called cohousing, in which about 15 to 30 homes are clustered around a common house and open space.


The individual dwellings are private and self-contained, not communal, but the residents pool some resources. The common house might include a shared guest room, kitchen, laundry and shed.

The concept began in Denmark in the 1970s and has become popular in Europe and North America. There are about half a dozen cohousing communities in Australian cities already, and several more in planning.


“Cohousing has a lot of appeal for current generations because you maintain personal equity and autonomy,” Bourne says. “And you don’t have to move out to the country. It’s an option for medium density urban living that still has the room for chooks and a veggie garden.”

 

Published in The Big Issue, with photographs by Conor Ashleigh.

For further information, go to abc.net.au/rn/utopias

Pacific islands face change that’s hard to believe in

In Environment, Social justice on

As the next round of climate negotiations continue in Cancún, the future of low-lying Pacific islands looks like a matter of faith. Written with photographer Rodney Dekker.

FAAUI Siale is sitting in her open-walled home, at the northern end of Tuvalu’s atoll capital, Funafuti. Three generations live here, side-by-side on a sliver of coral sand barely 50 metres wide. Ocean waves thump the land to her left, and a lagoon laps the shore on her right.

It is Sunday morning, and Siale sings along to hymns on the radio as a heavy wind blows and coconut palms rattle and splay towards the ground. To an outsider, everything about this scene seems precarious; but not to Siale – and for that, she claims divine assurance.

Tuvalu is the world’s second least populous nation, after Vatican City. Its 12,000 residents live on several reefs and atolls located halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Nearly all the land is less than three metres above the sea.

The director of the tiny nation’s environment department, Matio Tekinene, says his people are already suffering the ill effects of climate change.

Rising sea levels and more frequent king tides are causing coastal erosion and salinating the groundwater, making it hard to grow the traditional subsistence root crop, pulaka. The fresh water supply is now restricted to rainfall, which arrives in unfamiliar patterns at unfamiliar times. Coral bleaching is reducing fish stocks close to shore.

“Food security related to climate change is a very important issue for us,” he says. “Tuvaluan people, we live very much on our limited crops and marine resources. Nowadays there is a great change, because we have difficulty to grow these natural foods.”

But Faaui Siale, 60, is unconcerned. She does not accept that the sea level is rising. “I believe there won’t be any more floods, because of the covenant between Noah and the Lord God,” she says, with her daughter-in-law interpreting. “They made a promise during those days that there won’t be another flood in the world.”

It’s a belief shared by many of her compatriots. Recently, a survey conducted by the Tuvalu Christian Church found that nearly one-third of the population does not believe in climate change, based on their interpretation of the Old Testament.

In Genesis, Chapter 9, after the great flood subsides, God tells Noah there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth, and chooses the rainbow as the symbol of that promise.

Earlier in the morning, Siale and her family gathered next door to worship with their neighbour, Reverend Tafue Lusama, a minister in the Tuvalu Christian Church. The church is the country’s dominant religious organisation, with a membership comprising nine out of ten Tuvaluans.

Reverend Lusama, however, prefers an alternative interpretation of God’s pledge to Noah. “God is faithful to his covenant and He is not causing climate change and sea level rise,” he says. “It is human-induced, not divinely induced.”

The minister has built a low, concrete sea wall to protect his home. “Climate change is one of the church’s focal areas,” he says. “We believe that whatever impacts the lives of our people impacts the church, and climate change definitely affects the lives and the spirituality of our people.”

For the past five years, Reverend Lusama has been the chair of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network. The group coordinates the various NGOs who provide climate programs within the country, and also sends delegates to international forums, advocating for strong international action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’ve been raising our voices to be heard by the industrialised countries and the international community and still we are being ignored,” he says. “Land is equivalent to life in our culture. If your land has been gradually eroded by the sea, you are looking at your life being eaten away.

“Put simply, why should I die for the sake of luxury for others? That is injustice.”

Tuvalu is not alone among island nations crying out for deep emissions cuts by major polluters. At last year’s UN Copenhagen conference, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) argued for a legally binding agreement consistent with a global temperature rise of less than 1.5 degrees Celsius – a level that would give their nations a chance of survival.

They will take a similar case to this year’s UN negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, which run from November 29 to December 10.

Early this month, Kiribati – Tuvalu’s near neighbour in the Pacific – hosted its own meeting, the Tarawa Climate Change Conference. The President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, says the discussions sought to establish a more conciliatory atmosphere before the resumption of UN-sponsored talks.

“Some countries are more vulnerable now, but every country is vulnerable in one form or another – I believe the international community is in agreement on that issue. We should start by identifying the points of agreement and move on. Let’s not begin with the most contentious issues. Let’s work those out over time,” he says.

At the Tarawa conference, a dozen countries, including China, Japan, Australia and Brazil, signed the Ambo Declaration, affirming the “urgent need for more and immediate action” and calling for “concrete decisions” in Mexico. The United States, the United Kingdom and Canada attended the daylong meeting, but only as observers.

Kelly Dent, climate change policy advisor for Oxfam, says that while the significance of the declaration shouldn’t be overstated, it may be useful as a reference point for the coming negotiations. “Any conference that brings together these developing and developed countries, including China, is significant.”

She says that although the Pacific island nations will call for a legally binding agreement to be signed this week, they will settle for less, especially if there’s a push to fast track adaptation finance.

“If they see strong signals towards a legally binding agreement next year in South Africa, then I think that may be enough to satisfy them that significant progress is being made,” she says.

“People from these countries need reduced emissions but they also need to see well-targeted money to adapt to the impacts they’re seeing now, and they need to have a say in where that money goes.”

In Kiribati and Tuvalu, adaptation projects are already underway – from building sea walls and planting mangroves to prevent coastal erosion, to installing water tanks to supply drinking water and promoting home gardening as a means of strengthening food security and halting declining health standards.

But these measures are just the beginning. President Tong says his country cannot afford to cover its adaptation needs without significant international assistance. “With the resource constraints that we have as a developing country it’s not easy for us to address these challenges,” he says.

“The full impact of climate change is a tide we cannot stem. We keep moving back from the shoreline. In a country like Kiribati, with very narrow islands, the room to move back is very limited.”

Back on Funafuti, Reverend Lusama maintains hope. “We are optimistic about Cancún and what is going to happen there and the reason is that we cannot afford to doubt,” he says. “We believe in humanity and its ability to do the right thing at the right time.”

As the winds blow and the tides change by Faaui Siale’s simple home, it’s clear that she and her family are at the mercy of forces far larger than themselves, no matter her beliefs. The people of Kiribati and Tuvalu must hope their prayers do not go unanswered.

Read this article, and see Rodney Dekker’s multimedia show, on the Sydney Morning Herald website.

See the article as it was published in WA News:

WA News article 1

WA News article 2

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.

Green renters

In Environment, The Age on

Apartment renters can make the most of their limited eco-options.

WHEN Nina Bailey moved to her rented flat in Thornbury two years ago, the first thing she missed was her compost heap. “I suddenly had to throw food in my bin and I hate doing that – I’m very conscious that rubbish bins are generally half full of food,” she says.

The next glitch was greywater. “There are lots of ways to harvest and distribute grey water, but when you don’t have a garden, what can you do?” she says. “Most of the sustainability things I was doing seemed to be related to having a garden.”

Eco-wise renters may find the going tough in detached houses, but life can seem even browner in an apartment, according to Chris Ward, from the Green Renters blog and tenant education service.

As well as the usual struggle to communicate with landlords and avoid making structural changes, apartment renters are usually lumped with a lack of outdoor space and restrictions imposed by the body corporate. “Even something as simple as hanging your washing out on a balcony might not be allowed,” Ward says.

Nevertheless, he maintains there’s plenty of action to take. “As with the rental community as a whole, many of the things you can do are more related to your habits and where you spend your money, instead of big, conceptual changes.”

Standard retrofitting practices all apply: vigorous draught sealing, thorough light globe swapping and careful water-efficiency re-fitting. And when you sign up for electricity, be sure you choose 100 per cent GreenPower.

Flat dwellers can compensate for lack of a yard by employing extra tricks, such as flushing the toilet with greywater from the shower, and growing a lush balcony garden. “You can use all sorts of things as pots, from wheelbarrows and boxes to baskets and bags, and then take them with you when you move,” Ward says. “You can compost in an apartment as well – Bokashi Buckets are the best option and they work well indoors.”

When it comes to bigger changes, tenants can use scheduled maintenance or conked-out appliances as eco-pressure points: try requesting water- and energy-efficient upgrades. “A lot of renters are fearful, but often, if you just ask you’ll be surprised how many landlords will say yes,” he says.

“You have to be firm, friendly and confident. If you’ve been a tenant for several years you can use that as leverage.” It’s also wise to cultivate a good relationship with your real estate agent – sometimes they’ll be in a better position to push landlords on your behalf.

In Thornbury, Bailey decided to be upfront about her green ambitions – at work, she’s the sustainable living program manager at Environment Victoria. She got over her no-backyard blues by rigging up a funnel and pipe system to shift greywater from her shower to the shared garden.

It’s difficult for renters to join the body corporate, but there are other ways to influence decisions. “I talked to other residents about composting,” Bailey says, “and one of the owner-occupiers convinced the body corporate to buy compost bins.”

Environment Victoria has just updated its Victorian Green Renters’ Guide, which includes a comprehensive list of retrofitting advice and a summary of the rebates now available. For flat tenants, it suggests encouraging the body corporate to install low-energy globes and timers for external lighting.

Bailey has found an unexpected upside to apartment living: reducing her overall consumption. “I only have a small amount of space, so I have to reduce clutter. It makes me focus on not building up too much waste or junk, and on reusing as much as I can.”