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

Setting an example is more influential than you might think.

IF you reduce your environmental footprint, what effect does it have on your neighbours?

A few years ago, American psychologist Robert Cialdini studied the electricity use of about 300 Californian households (PDF). After establishing the homes’ baseline consumption, the researchers hung a card on each door, informing the residents how they compared to the neighbourhood average.

Over the ensuing weeks, they found that those above the average cut their use. But, interestingly, those below the line actually increased their consumption. They were drawn towards the social norm – the “magnetic middle”.

There’s more to the story, however: when the researchers added a smiley face to the low users’ feedback, they stuck with their lower usage.

In another study undertaken around the same time (PDF), householders told Dr Cialdini and his team that in saving energy, their primary motivations were to preserve the environment, be socially responsible and save money (in that order). But in practise, the researchers found that the energy conservation habits of their neighbours had the strongest pull of all.

Subsequently, Dr Cialdini began working with US software company Opower, helping them to craft electricity billing information in a way that encourages conservation. And they do it, in part, with smiley faces.

The Opower approach is spreading. Some local electricity retailers have begun benchmarking their bills, but unless it’s done carefully – to avoid the upward pull of the magnetic middle – it won’t help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Yann Burden, from Billcap, has been working on energy information software to suit Australians. He says the lessons apply to more than just electricity. The Target 155 campaign on Victorians’ water consumption worked in a similar way.

“People put up signs if they used bore water or tank water. We were all very proud of the effort we made,” Mr Burden says.

That kind of signalling is important, both for the wider public and for green-minded folks who go beyond the call of duty. Based on their research on hybrid vehicles, economists Steven and Alison Sexton developed a theory of “conspicuous conservation”.

They identified a trend in which individuals, driven by their concern about climate change and environmental damage, “seek status through displays of austerity rather than ostentation”.

The economists found that the Toyota Prius was more popular than competing hybrids because of its distinctive shape. It was recognisably a hybrid. What’s more, people were willing to pay a premium for that recognition.

“People want to signal,” Mr Burden explains. “Householders don’t want to hide their solar panels. They want people to see them, and that’s good – as long as they’re well oriented. It’s much better than trying to guilt people into change.

So if you’re composting or reducing packaging waste, growing vegies or installing draught proofing, make the most of it by telling your family, friends and neighbours. You could even put a sign in your window or a sticker on your letterbox explaining what you’re up to.

“As a society that needs to consume less, we need these positive social norms to help us understand that once we’ve saved money, we shouldn’t spend it on more consumption,” Mr Burden says.

“Signalling comes through our consumption decisions, but also through people having conversations. I think we’ll see energy use becoming the next dinner party conversation – people asking, ‘Well, how many kilowatt hours do you use?’”

Read this article at the Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Kicking old habits is about getting the timing right.

THERE’S no shortage of information about how to go green, from government incentives and advice, to council forums and eco-blogs. But even people who want to reduce their environmental footprint can find it hard to make changes that last.

Dr Jim Curtis, from BehaviourWorks Australia, says one explanation is that we’re creatures of habit. Many of the ways we use energy and water and produce waste are part of our daily routines. We tend to commute in a certain way and buy the same kinds of food at the same places.

“Whether it’s driving your car to work, long showers, leaving the lights on, not recycling properly or throwing out your organic waste, these are likely to be habitual behaviours,” he says. “They are repeated frequently in the same context and not given much thought. They’re things we just do.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Although individuals can change their habits – with the right combination of motivation, support and persistence – only a small minority actually do so. Rather than considering the pros and cons and making calculated decisions, most people stick to what they’ve always done.

The cliché is true, Dr Curtis says: habits are hard to break. Researchers recently found that it took people an average of 66 days for a new activity to become automatic. (The length of time varied for different people – from just 18 days, all the way to 254 days.)

Given that it takes so much repetition for a habit to become ingrained, encouraging some kinds of green behaviour requires more than just the right information or rebate.

But here’s the good news: at certain times in our lives, we’re more open to altering our routines.

One of the world’s leading experts on habits, Professor Bas Verplanken, from the University of Bath, is speaking at a public forum in Melbourne, on Tuesday, July 24.

Professor Verplanken’s research tests the idea that there are key moments when it’s much easier for people to change their habits – events such as moving house, starting university, switching jobs, retiring from work, or getting pregnant.

In one ongoing project, he is comparing the way people respond to various kinds of sustainability advice, and investigating the difference between residents who have and haven’t moved house recently.

In previous research, he analysed the effect of moving house on the choices people made about transport. He found that eco-conscious people who had moved recently commuted by car less often than like-minded folks who’d stayed put.

And they did it without any outside prompting. That is, the break in their usual patterns gave people a chance to switch to a transport mode – such as walking, cycling or catching the bus – that better suited their beliefs.

For householders, there’s a clear message: it’s easier to get into a new green routine when things are in flux.

“In those moments when our usual patterns of behaviour have changed, we’re looking for information or direction about how to do things,” Dr Curtis explains. “It’s a great opportunity to change your lifestyle and consumption patterns.”

“For example, trying to get my wife to turn off the lights has been a big challenge for me. If we ever move house, that would be a moment I should really take advantage of.”

Read this article at the Age online

Do big green changes really grow from little ones?

BRITISH physicist David MacKay has a confronting message about what’s necessary for our society to really go green: “If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little,” he says.

In his book, Sustainable energy – without the hot air (available free online) he analyses the relative energy footprint of different parts of the UK economy, such as transport, heating and cooling, and food and farming.

Professor MacKay argues that we must break our “fossil fuel addiction” for three reasons: we’ll run out some day; we need to avoid dangerous climate change; and we need to find secure sources of energy.

A key part of doing that, he says, is to reduce energy demand. But we mustn’t be mistaken about the kinds of things that really make a difference. For instance, unplugging your mobile phone charger will subtract only a “tiny tiny fraction of your total energy consumption”.

“The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger, 0.01 kWh [per day], is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second,” he writes. “Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is.”

Illustrations by Robin Cowcher

In contrast, air travel is one of the true big-ticket items for individuals. He found that the energy used in taking a return-flight from the UK to South Africa is “nearly as big as the energy used by driving an average car 50 km per day, every day, all year”.

Likewise, although the impact of imported manufactures – including vehicles, whitegoods, machinery, electronic equipment and steel – aren’t normally added to Britain’s footprint, their embodied energy use accounts for more than heating and cooling combined.

For householders, he found that two of the best ways to reduce energy use are installing solar hot water and turning the temperature down on your heating (and up on your air conditioning).

“Turning the thermostat down is the single most effective energy-saving technology available to a typical person – every degree you turn it down will reduce your heating costs by 10%; and heating is likely to be the biggest form of energy consumption in most British buildings,” he writes.

But can small personal changes ever add up to something more significant?

BehaviourWorks Australia, a research collaboration based at the Monash Sustainability Institute, is exploring exactly this question. Earlier this year, it hosted Professor John Thørgesen, a Danish academic who specialises in social and environmental marketing.

In 2009, he co-authored a report called Simple and Painless? published by the World Wildlife Fund. It argues that global environmental problems can’t be met through “marginal lifestyle changes”. The foot-in-the-door approach – easy steps such as switching light globes or showerheads – can only be justified when it’s linked to more ambitious behaviour, such as active citizenship and activism.

It also contends that encouraging householders to go green for personal gain – that is, reduced bills – doesn’t stimulate the kind of broad attitude shift required.

Dr Jim Curtis, from BehaviourWorks, says we need to understand the way people perceive themselves once they complete those simple steps. “We have to avoid thinking that we’ve done our bit. We have to link small actions to bigger ones by fostering a sense of citizenship that motivates people to make more ambitious changes,” he says.

Read this article at the Age online

Households going green won’t necessarily cut emissions

THE carbon tax kicks in today, and while its effect on electricity bills will be run over hot coals, another of its impacts has been overlooked.

As it stands, the policy – especially once it turns into a cap-and-trade system in 2015 – has a curious and counter-intuitive outcome: householders who want to go green won’t necessarily make any difference to Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“In its current form, the emissions trading scheme not only sets a cap above which emissions can’t rise, but simultaneously sets a floor below which they can’t fall,” says Richard Denniss, executive director of The Australia Institute.

“So if an individual reduces their emissions – or the residents of a high-rise building, a street, or even a local council area get together to reduce their emissions – it will simply free up spare permits for a polluter somewhere else.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The government has taken a small step towards addressing the issue. A spokesperson for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency said that purchases of GreenPower “will be taken into account” when the caps are set five years in advance.

Also, the Climate Change Authority – the independent body that begins operation tomorrow – will also consider “whether a robust methodology can be developed to recognise additional voluntary action by households”.

Alan Pears, energy efficiency expert and Adjunct Professor at RMIT, says the same problem exists in the European carbon trading system. In the United Kingdom, an organisation called Sandbag helps individuals buy and cancel pollution permits.

Here, the federal government suggests that householders who want to meaningfully reduce their carbon footprint could choose to do the same. But Mr Pears argues that those people would end up paying double – to cover both the carbon tax and the extra permits – and have no idea which companies they’re supporting.

“If you buy carbon permits and take them out of the market you don’t know who surrendered them or what they’re linked to,” he says.

As Dr Denniss argues, it’s not only householders that are affected. Measures taken by businesses, local councils and regional governments are in the same boat.

Earlier this year, the Victorian government scrapped its target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 (from 2000 levels), citing its ineffectiveness given the national cap.

The ACT government has legislated an even more ambitious target – a 40 per cent reduction by 2020 (from 1990 levels) – and so far, it’s sticking to its goal. But Dr Denniss warns that the carbon trading scheme must be tweaked “to ensure that the efforts of the ACT and other communities are not in vain”.

Mr Pears says that unless there’s a change, organisations that want to become carbon neutral will end up purchasing offsets from overseas.

But he says there’s still cause for governments and householders to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy, especially with the price of solar power fast matching standard retail electricity rates.

“There are lots of reasons why it still makes sense, whether that’s reducing peak demand costs, holding down energy prices, creating employment, or just improving comfort at home and saving money on your energy bills,” he says.

“The frustrating thing is that in terms of the physics, it does reduce emissions. But because of an accounting flaw, it isn’t counted towards cutting Australia’s or the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read this article at The Age online

Heat sensitive pictures let people see where their homes let in the cold.

LAST year, the Bayside Climate Change Action Group bought a thermal imaging camera, courtesy of a grant from their council. Volunteers have begun using it to provide free thermal efficiency assessments for local residents.

“The images are quite eye-catching and funky,” says Cheryl May, from the group. “It’s one thing to tell somebody there’s probably a draught under their door, and another thing to show them an image where you can actually see it. The colour demonstrates that there is colder air coming in.”

Some of the immediate results were surprising. When one member took a snapshot of his ceiling, it revealed a strange bright spot. “He couldn’t work out what it was,” Ms May says. “It turned out to be a possum.”

Elsewhere, the results have been more instructive – one resident, who had just completed a renovation, requested her builder return to fix the gappy insulation that they discovered with the camera.

“You can really see where the problems are,” Ms May says. “You can point it at the ceiling and see where the insulation is, and where it’s missing. You can see leaks coming from fridge seals. We’re trying to educate people about the way heat loss occurs.”

A thermal imaging camera works best when there’s a big temperature difference between inside and outside. For each snapshot, it produces both a thermal image and a normal one. During winter, draughts, gaps and glazing show up in purplish-blue, contrasted with an orange-yellow glow in places where the building is better insulated.

The Bayside Climate Change Action Group aims to visit 50 local households with the camera before the end of the year. If you live outside the area, you could rent one or hire a professional to conduct your own report.

One of the group’s volunteers, Danielle King, is an experienced sustainability assessor. She says many of the camera’s findings are straightforward – it just helps to communicate common problems, such as the “Swiss cheese–effect” of halogen downlights (which must be clear of insulation, so as to reduce the risk of fire).

“If you get in bed and there are holes in your blanket, it doesn’t keep you warm. It’s exactly the same with ceiling insulation,” she says.

But the camera reveals secrets too; especially about how your insulation has been installed in hard to see places.

“The beauty of the camera is that it can see through the walls, literally,” she says. “You also find a lot of construction gaps, where air leaks through skirting boards. You wouldn’t pick those up otherwise and those heat losses can sometimes be quite high.”

One house Ms King visited recently in Brighton had an average daily use of 40 kWh – well over double the state average.

“They had recently moved homes and their bills had gone up a huge amount in this new house,” she says. Her report detailed many possible remedies, but the first thing she recommended was that they thoroughly seal draughts.

With winter upon us, the same advice applies to every household. And you don’t need a thermal camera to find the gaps. Try holding an incense stick close to window frames, door frames and skirting boards, and watch how the smoke moves. You can use unspooled tape from old cassettes in the same way. 

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher