Michael Green

Freelance Journalist

  • Home
  • About
  • Features
  • Book
  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • RSS

How green are renovations?

In Greener Homes on August 26, 2012

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. 

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit

Comments

  1. James Craft says

    January 24, 2013 at 8:50 pm

    It is very important to go green to save our environment but we generally do not pay much attention to it when we are renovating or making our home. We give preference to modern looks. The author has suggested a right option of sharing to save resources, if we all could understand this.

    Most on the web gamers who register with an on the internet wager site as of late, achieve this so that you can execute the favored on-line pokies. These have flashy graphics, superior sound outcomes, and brilliant characteristics which include reward rounds and precise bonuses. The beauty of online casino is each individual online video match may be quite amongst a sort, and has loads of variations as opposed to the alternative pokie online video online games.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Articles

    • ►Features
      • ►Environment
      • ►Architecture and building
      • ►Social justice
      • ►Community development
      • ►The Age
      • ►The Big Issue
      • ►Arts
      • ►Nature Climate Change
      • ►Nature Energy
      • ►Overland Journal
    • ▼Greener Homes
      • Cooking without gas
      • Community wind
      • Fair Food Week
      • Shouting from the rooftops
      • Kulin calendar
      • Food Know How
      • Energy use portals
      • Waves of change
      • Breaking the gridlock
      • The right kind of urban growth
      • Regenerating after the bushfire
      • Local investing
      • Superannuation's carbon footprint
      • The story of change
      • Zero emissions in Yarra
      • Ready for disaster?
      • Better Block
      • Peak demand
      • Corporate greenwash
      • Distributed infrastructure
      • National recycling week
      • Owner-builder
      • Smart Living Ballarat
      • Retrofitting the suburbs
      • Effective speed
      • The New Joneses
      • Mining the nature strip
      • Power information for the people
      • Connecting backyard innovators
      • Electric bikes
      • How green are renovations?
      • Laundering
      • Fix it
      • Dog poo biogas digester
      • Comfort creep
      • The power of social norms
      • Breaking habits
      • Significant behaviour change
      • Carbon tax and voluntary abatement
      • Thermal imaging camera
      • Energy monitors
      • House relocation
      • Simple living
      • One Planet developers
      • Community-funded solar
      • Greening of Gavin
      • Garage sale trail
      • Composting coffee grinds
      • Fridges
      • Fungi
      • Sustainable Chippendale
      • Local harvest
      • Heyfield's flags
      • Seed saving
      • Green Town
      • Cape Paterson ecovillage
      • Car sharing
      • Heritage fruit trees
      • Buy Nothing Christmas
      • Edible weeds
      • State of Australian Cities
      • Mandatory disclosure
      • Backyard ponds
      • Climate change in Victoria
      • Bugs in the garden
      • Household solar energy
      • Backyard aquaponics
      • Over-consumption
      • ClimateWatch
      • Indoor plants
      • Ten per cent challenge
      • Backyard biodiversity
      • Condensation
      • Bottled water
      • Food-sensitive cities
      • Carbon tax and households
      • Repair
      • Lifetime affordable housing
      • Greenhouse calculator
      • Design for long life
      • Pocket neighbourhoods
      • Commuting by bike
      • Light pollution
      • Flying
      • Home occupancy
      • Smart garden watering
      • Solar panel rebate update
      • Home composting
      • The electronics life cycle
      • Cool roofs
      • Walking
      • Sharing websites
      • Reincarnated McMansion
      • Urban harvest food swaps
      • Urban stormwater
      • Recycling in apartments
      • Wicking beds
      • Earthships
      • Onsite wastewater treatment
      • Bottling with Fowlers Vacola
      • Build it back green
      • Beekeeping
      • Wastewater recycling
      • Transition Towns
      • Cross-ventilation
      • No impact November
      • Planning for sustainability
      • Place making
      • Hepburn Wind
      • Concrete and paving
      • The nine-star house
      • Recycled interiors
      • Resilient cities
      • Packaging waste
      • Sustainable House Day 2010
      • Passive house
      • Soil preparation
      • Container housing
      • Urban orchards
      • Replacing halogen downlights
      • Residential stormwater
      • Sustainable housing developments
      • Retrofitting older homes
      • Solar energy bulk purchase schemes
      • Embodied energy and life cycle assessment
      • Community-supported agriculture
      • Green renovation advice
      • Community composting
      • Straw bale construction
      • Small houses
      • Wall and floor insulation
      • Community gardens
      • Sustainable prefab
      • Household energy ratings
      • Compost toilets
      • Rebate update
      • Cohousing
      • Permaculture
      • Thermal mass
      • Reducing building waste
      • Preserving
      • Indoor air quality
      • Low-energy lighting
      • Sustainable Living Festival
      • Cooling your home
      • New parents and babies
      • Water restrictions
      • Green Christmas
      • Smart meters and power-mates
      • Useful home sustainability websites
      • Shading your home
      • Recycling e-waste
      • Skylights
      • Household cleaning
      • No-dig veggie garden
      • Carbon calculators and offsets
      • Drought-proofing your garden
      • Reducing household waste
      • Green roofs
      • Greywater
      • The new solar panel rebate
      • Balcony gardens
      • Solar hot water
      • Earth building
      • Window coverings and retrofitted double-glazing
      • Landlords and renters
      • GreenPower
      • Sustainable timber
      • Green Loans Program
      • Kerbside recycling
      • Heating systems
      • Appliances
      • Draught-proofing
      • Eco paints
      • Keeping chickens
      • Composting
      • Solar photovoltaics
      • Ceiling insulation
      • Glazing
      • Rainwater tanks
    • ►Blog

Recent Articles

  • She Called Me Red
  • how are you today
  • Keeping it real
  • No Exit
  • Faces of the Rohingya
  • Contested territory

Topics

  • Articles (390)
    • Features (151)
      • Environment (81)
      • Architecture and building (39)
      • Social justice (50)
      • Community development (38)
      • The Age (74)
      • The Big Issue (19)
      • Arts (12)
      • Nature Climate Change (1)
      • Nature Energy (1)
      • Overland Journal (1)
    • Greener Homes (180)
    • Blog (60)
Tweets by @michaelbgreen

© Copyright 2017 Michael Green · All Rights Reserved