Best laid plans are often victim of the user..

Mid-semester break is upon the long-suffering students. Oh we doth protest too much! Despite a number of assignments which magically need to be completed before next week's return to grindstone, I could not let a 5-day weekend go by without some bush camping and general R&R. There is something strangely therapeutic about no mobile reception, dubious hygiene practices and beholding some of our most amazing creatures. Best not tried in the confines of a civilised home!

Our destination was some of the gorgeous remote coastal area of South Australia, Lincoln National Park and Coffin Bay National Park as well as further up the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula around Venus Bay. We had quite a visual feast of Australian emblems - wallabies, kangaroos and emus, not to mention a host of other furry creatures and quite poignantly given the Christian influence of the festivities, a plague of locusts. The highlight had to be the amazing pod of more than 20 dolphins frollicking in the waters off the point at Venus Bay.

With many hours spent driving between camp sites, I got thinking about the whole National Park concept. One of the strange things they allow folk to do in SA is drive on the beaches (including in the National Parks) which doesn't strike me as a particularly environmentally sustainable thing to practice (on multiple levels - from carbon emissions to erosion and squashed furry locals).

After Yellowstone in the USA, it turns out that the Royal National Park in N.S.W. was the second National Park in the world. I was fascinated to read about its history which highlights that even some of the most inspired ideas can sometimes run contrary to good sense in hindsight. You'll note in the link above that in the early days of what was then just the National Park (QE II - the woman, not the boat, caught a train once in its vicinity and miraculously the name was changed in the 1950's), the park was "improved" for the entertainment of visitors, to include vast expanses of lawn and the introduction of exotic species! The type of thing which makes even the less environmentally minded in this day and age wonder....

Will we look back in 100 years time at the way we managed National Parks and also wonder, what on earth were we thinking?

What on earth?

Through various means in the last couple of days I have discovered that this year Good Friday and Earth Day will co-exist in harmony on 22 April. I've always been somewhat skeptical about Earth Hour, Earth Day, World Environmental Day and their ilk. After all, good environmental habits should not be entertaining fads lasting merely one to twenty four hours...isn't that why we have celebrities ?? Like a puppy, they should be for life...

It was with amusement however, that I discovered the (take a breath) Department for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (...in the Court of King Caractacus, were just passing by) have a Calendar of environmental events which can provide you with a daily "environmental" cause to think about if you so desire. Must admit there are a few occasions which do not fit the traditional stereotypical environmental cause (but good luck to those who enjoyed Women's history month in March).

If you are sitting there (no matter what the date or indeed despite whatever day you could be celebrating), thinking what useful environmental habit can I form this year, the Earth Day website has some ideas which form a campaign Billion Acts of Green. Sign up if that's your thing but if not, maybe get an idea for your next "green habit" that can last a lifetime. Who knows, maybe the world could be better off...every day of the year.

Waste not, want not

If you didn't catch Hungry Beast on ABC 1 last night they did great program on waste - everything from human waste power generation to the wicked waste of food in the average Australian's fridge.

You can catch it on ABC's iview for the next 13 days but like all good things, it too has an expiry date.
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/750847

Hope it gets you thinking...

There's alternative and then there's alternative...

Plenty to do and nothing much of note of late...

With mid-semester break in sight (oh the life of the overworked student), it's been a busy couple of weeks of completing readings, assignments and the like. In all honesty, I haven't tripped over any interesting facts, outrageous statements or inspiring pieces with which I could share. Apologies for allowing my imagination to go on holidays before the break!

I did complete a rather unorthodox assignment over the weekend on energy and alternative fuels. Suffice to say, it really did go to the extreme of alternative fuels. I believe the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that liquid fossil fuels are hard to beat for their energy density and convenience. For your amusement only, allow me to share one of the crazy questions (plus crazy answer)...

Estimate the mass of a McDonald’s Big Mac required to give an equivalent energy content of 50L of gasoline.

According to ABARE’s list of energy content conversions, automotive gasoline has an estimated energy content of 34.2MJ/L

The estimated energy content in 50L of automotive gasoline would be

= Energy content by volume x volume

= 34.2 x 50

= 1710 MJ

Using the McDonald’s published energy estimate of a Big Mac which is 1030kJ/100g

then the equivalent amount of Big Macs for 50L of automotive gasoline would be

= 1710x10⁶ / 10.3 x10⁹

= 0.1660T

Extrapolating that if energy content per 100g is 1030kJ and energy content per serve of Big Mac is 2060 kJ, then each Big Mac is approximately 200g

Therefore to determine the number of Big Mac equivalents

= 0.1660/ 0.0002

= approximately 830 Big Macs

The explosive truth about waste..

Today I was in a tutorial where we were discussing ways to use domestic waste in anaerobic digester, which I understand for most people is not a standard item for discussion. Take organic waste, introduce microbes which thrive happily without oxygen, exclude air by covering and let it fester. You will soon have a wonderful collection of really putrid smelling gases and very angry neighbours. The gases are flammable (and a potential energy source) so you can create some pretty cool flame throwers or blow something up which could reduce your neighbourhood popularity.

Of course, your local council landfill is actually an industrial-strength anaerobic digester and your local council may have already be fitted it with an industrial strength flame thrower. The point of burning off the methane is so it doesn't migrate into the atmosphere and actively become 21 times more effective than its friend carbon dioxide at contributing to the greenhouse effect. There is an art to preventing explosive situations in local housing estates nearby but that is a completely different story....

Landfill is not always an option. After all, what do you do it when you have limited places to bury it?

Welcome to the waste challenge (of the non-nuclear variety) which is an everyday issue in Japan. The entire country separates their waste into three piles - flammable, non-flammable and recyclable. Japan relies on incinerating their waste, by the hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually. The key environmental issue is the combustion products when waste containing chlorine is burnt includes dioxins as a by-product. Nasty little creatures which are persistent in the environment, bio-accumulate in fatty tissue (stick and don't leave your body) and potentially cause cancers and reproductive defects.

So when new regulations regarding incineration closed down the options for a Japanese town, they began a  journey towards Zero Waste. The video is worth the view (bear with the advert and the subtitles). It is not without frustrations - 34 different types of separating, the requirement that everything needs to be washed, an ageing population and the whole time commitment.

How far are you away from Zero Waste?

When wasting energy becomes too expensive you'll see action

..and sadly probably not before.

Austerity is the new buzz word in global economics, as in "austerity measures". Perhaps make it your word of the week? Austere means "characterized by strictness, severity, or restraint", in short, "simple".

For those who like to watch life and times beyond our shores, you would be aware that austerity measures have seen people demonstrating in the streets of Europe, as they struggle to comes to terms with enormous deficits (and in the case of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, paying back their bailouts by the EU). This is not an Australian-style political fear campaign, these countries are economically actually in dire straits.

Enter Sustainability. Suddenly wasting all that energy is not economically feasible after all... Of course, strangely it was apparently quite OK in the good times!

The Daily Mail in 2009 took great pleasure in describing Buckingham Palace as "topping the list of Dirty Dozen London Buildings" and while I won't vouch for their journalism, the photos in this article are fascinating. The article was highlighting that while the UK government were pouring money into reducing domestic emissions from houses, the largest generators of emissions were actually very old, very leaky public buildings and ironically the same taxpayers were stumping up (in the most part) for those energy bills.

Roll on 2011, and in the light of austerity measures, suddenly retrofitting these public buildings to save energy now makes sense! The extension to the London Mayor's RE:FIT climate change programme means that by spending approximately 2.7 million Euros (which is not an insignificant sum), the good British taxpayer runs the risk of saving millions of pounds in additional energy costs, every year, not just the year of the retrofitting...

Just imagine if someone had seen the sense in improving energy efficiency in the good times when there was plenty of money floating around? It seems sad that, in the words of Boris Johnson (debate about the man another time), only now they see the sense of conserving "precious public funds at a time when every extra penny counts”.

I'm a taxpayer. I'd like to think in a sustainable economy my public funds are always precious and we should always get good value, not just when it suits our politicians!

 

Sustainable jobs?

When we think Sustainable jobs inevitably we think "Green Jobs", jobs which have a mission statement to save the planet, jobs which apparently don't harm mother nature, that sort of thing. In short, it's all about the environment.
Somewhere along the line we often conveniently forget that sustainability has three pillars - environmental, social and economic. Much earlier in the life of this blog, I wrote about the lecturer who lead a workshop on the sustainability of our individual houses and at the end of the discussion simply said "Does your house make you happy"?
Essentially she was tapping into the social indicators we often overlook when assessing the sustainability of a house. Some examples;

·         Quality of buildings as place to live and work (fit for purpose type concept)

·         Building related effects on health and safety of users (it's always lurking out there...)

·         Barrier-free use of building

·         User satisfaction

·         Social cohesion and participation of users

As I rode home this afternoon, I was still marvelling at the enthusiasm one of my other lecturers has for her work. She has a "real day job" and does a little lecturing on a guest basis for part of the semester each year. She beams with enthusiasm as she talks about what she does each day and she appears to be delighted when a student answers a question demonstrating that they understood. If we looked at her job like you assess a house then suddenly you can start ticking a few of the boxes above... it suits her, it isn't adversely affecting her health, there appears nothing insurmountable in her way, she enjoys it and it allows her interaction with those she wants to associate with.

Too often we look through the sustainability prism and only follow the green band. For those who remember ROYGBIV, you'll know it's not the only path to the light.

It's good to know there are sustainable jobs out there and they are not all about saving the world... I hope you have one of them.