EcoRadio

Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Largest biochar research project in Australia’s history

    Smaller-scale biochar research projects have already been funded by the Government, including through Richmond Landcare in NSW.

    “There is no single solution to climate change and we are investigating a wide range of measures which could help prepare Australia for the future,” Mr Burke said.

    “Hopefully this project will shed much more light on how biochar works – its potential, how to use it safely and any drawbacks.

    “We know that some biochars can be bad for plant growth and the wrong biochar with the wrong soil can cause toxic byproducts.

    “Research is key – and we believe the findings from this project will be important in global discussions on how biochar can be used in agriculture.”

    CSIRO Director of the Agricultural Sustainability Initiative Dr Brian Keating welcomed the funding.

    “The CSIRO is pleased to coordinate this important national project for Australian agriculture,” he said.

    “This project builds significantly on current research within the CSIRO and our research partners.

    “It will define the potential contribution that biochar production and application can make to productivity and carbon management in Australian agriculture.”

    The Climate Change Research Program is part of Australia’s Farming Future, the Government’s major climate change research program for our primary industries.

  • Pearson at odds with city greenies

    Pearson at odds with city greenies

    COMMENT: Tony Koch | May 23, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    A VISITOR strolling through the Brisbane CBD any weekday will almost certainly be confronted by an earnest-looking university-age youth handing out glossy pamphlets that tell how the Australian Wilderness Society is caring for Aborigines by “protecting their wild rivers”.

    The attendant donations tin is then shaken, and the brochures with their website referral seek funds to continue this version of God’s work.

    But the earnest-looking youth, like the Wilderness Society and the Queensland Government, cannot enunciate what imminent danger exists, for which they are providing this “protection” through never-ending solicitation for funds.

    The AWS website claims Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson is “pro-development” and therefore should be ignored, offering instead its opinion, which is formed not from actual living experiences on Cape York but from the al fresco tables in Brisbane’s West End.

    The Queensland Government and the AWS have struck this cosy “wild rivers” deal to lock up green preferences at elections. It involves the Bligh Government “declaring” certain rivers “wild”, giving them legislative protection from mining, cattle raising and any other type of development.

    The problem is that the land in Cape York is not the Bligh Government’s to trade away for green votes, thereby giving control to environmental groups who live thousands of kilometres away.

    Pearson and the vast majority of indigenous leaders on Cape York object strongly to being the pawns in this cheap political charade. Their main issue is that white people are again meddling in the lives of black Australians without being asked.

    They point out that the rivers of Cape York are pristine because of Aboriginal ownership, and they will stay that way without any “protection” from the AWS.

    Pearson was brought up on an alcohol-free mission run by the Lutheran Church, where he received a good education and lived in a violence-free home where his father each morning pulled his boots on and went to work.

    That simple scenario is all he wants for Aboriginal people today.

    But, he points out, any chance of Cape York Aborigines developing sustainable businesses in the future are being dashed by unwelcome controls such as those wielded by the AWS with the blessing of the Bligh Government.

    Pearson and the other Aboriginal leaders who fought for decades to get ownership of their land must wonder what those hard-earned court decisions really mean, when a government can just trade them off to curry favour with interfering green groups.

  • Sainsbury’s purchase of fish fingers isn’t enough to sustain certified palm-oil

     

     

    The roundtable and the environment group WWF set up a certification system to recognise sustainably produced palm oil. Production began in several countries last year, and in November, five years after the roundtable was set up, the first shipload of certified palm oil arrived in Rotterdam from south-east Asia. “Companies now have the means to buy responsibly,” said WWF’s Rodney Taylor.

     

    So, guess what. Nobody wants it. The stuff has been on sale for six months. But WWF reported last week that “only 1% of the sustainable palm oil available on the market has been bought.”

     

    “So far around 1.3m tonnes of certified sustainable palm oil has been produced, but less than 15,000 tonnes has been sold,” says Taylor. That’s out of a total annual global palm oil production of 28m tonnes.

     

    The trouble is that the certified oil commands a premium price that allows manufacturers and retailers to advertise the products as sustainable. And few companies seem to want to pay the higher price. So the remaining 1.285m tonnes has been poured back into the giant tub of regular palm oil and sold at regular prices.

     

    The only significant buyers of sustainable palm oil identified by WWF are Sainsbury’s in the UK. The retailer has so far bought products such as fish fingers containing 450 tonnes of certified palm oil and plans more products later in the year.

     

    If things continue like this the scheme will crash. And there will be a lot of palm oil growers in south-east Asia – many of whom didn’t see the point of the scheme in the first place – saying “I told you so”.

     

    In fact, if the roundtable operated by the rules it publishes, most of its members might have been thrown out. The RSPO says that “members are expected to communicate on an annual basis their progress in contributing directly to the production and use of sustainable palm oil … only those members who openly communicate progress will be allowed to continue their participation in the RSPO.”

     

    That “open communication” is ensured by putting the reports up on the RSPO web site. So we can all check that they are sending in their annual reports.

     

    I wondered how UK retailers were getting on? All the big supermarkets are members of the RSPO. But several have no progress report on the RSPO web site. One is Asda, which two years ago got headlines for a promise to “ban the sale of palm oil from unsustainable sources“

     

    Another is the Co-op, self-proclaimed as “Britain’s greenest grocer”. A third is Tesco. Its own website claims it is an “active member” of the RSPO and is “working on incorporating” certified palm oil into its products when they become available. So it’s not exactly up to date there either.

     

    Waitrose has not filed a report to the RSPO web site since 2006. Even Sainsbury’s, the good guys in the WWF press release, are out of time, having last updated in September 2007.

     

    In fact the only two British retailers with up-to-date annual progress reports are Marks & Spencer, which says it is selling six products containing certified palm oil from Colombia, and the electricity company npower, which sent in a note last autumn to say it had dropped plans to burn palm oil in its power stations.

     

    Among British manufacturers that took the trouble to join the roundtable, Cadbury, Northern Foods and Youngs Seafoods have not put progress reports on the website, United Biscuits and Heinz have not filed since 2007 and only Jordans cereals are up to date.

     

    It’s not a pretty picture. Why haven’t these companies been thrown off the RSPO for failing to follow its rules? There is a loophole in the rules that allows them to report “in members’ existing communications with their stakeholders, such as annual reports”, rather than on the website. But hiding the information in corporate reports does not really meet the requirement for “open communication”.

     

    And why join a club if you can’t be bothered to fill in its simple forms to explain how you are upholding its values. Unless of course it was greenwash in the first place.

     

    The RSPO probably only has a few months to get its act together. Companies like Sainsbury’s and food manufacturer Unilever promised when the RSPO was set up that all their products would be made from sustainable palm oil by 2015 – but less than a tenth of 1% of palm oil for sale is sustainably produced. The suspicion grows that few RSPO members really take its rules or its purpose seriously.

     

    • Do you know of any green claims that deserve closer examination? Email your examples to greenwash@guardian.co.uk or add your comments below

  • CPRS will lock out massive jobs boom

    “The Rudd Government’s Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme sandbags the
    old, polluting economy instead of embracing the tremendous potential of
    wholesale economic transformation.

    “Study after study has shown that a serious plan to transform Australia
    into a carbon neutral powerhouse would create a jobs boom, but a weak
    target and $12.6 billion in handouts to the biggest and noisiest
    polluters simply cannot deliver.

    “To deliver a clean energy jobs boom, we need jobs and training packages
    for workers most at risk in the old economy. We need an industry and
    manufacturing plan, along with policies to roll out renewable energy,
    energy efficiency, public transport systems and an intelligent grid, to
    create the jobs. And we need to aim high, with a strong emissions target
    that will actually protect the climate.

    “The Greens have been promoting these positive, jobs-creating policies
    for years, but the old parties are closing ranks with the old polluters
    and are locking out the climate and the community.

    “The Australian community expects the Minerals Council to fight tooth
    and nail for their short-term interests, but they have a right to expect
    their Government to stand up for Australia’s long-term future.

    “Tragically, the Rudd Government is more interested in listening to
    industry rent-seeking than the community demands for action to prevent
    climate crisis.”

  • Nuns arrive at eco-convent and leave behind high-carbon habit

     

    Among the £4.7 million building’s green features are solar panels to provide hot water, a woodchip boiler that will be fuelled by locally-sourced trees and a roof covered in sedum grass to better insulate the buildings and attract local wildlife.

    Rainwater from some of the roofs will be collected and used to flush the toilets and, instead of an electrically-driven waste water treatment plant, the architects have installed a reedbed sewage system. The effluent from the monastery will filter through the reedbed and, after it is processed through natural anaerobic digestion, the resulting water will trickle out onto the surrounding land.

    And the basic materials for the building – everything from timber to stone – have been sourced as locally as possible.

    “A lot of building projects start out with all these environmental features and, by the value engineering stage, usually you’ve lost quite a few of them,” said project architect Gill Smith of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, winners of the 2008 Stirling Prize. “The nuns have been remarkably good at sticking with their principles and not letting them drift as other clients tend to do. The list they’ve ended up with is quite impressive.”

    The nuns moved from the Victorian splendour of Stanbrook Abbey in rural Worcestershire because, according to abbess Dame Andrea Savage, manual labour was overtaking monasticism at the site. “We’re running a big building, spending thousands of pounds that we don’t have on looking after the place and heating it with oil and gas, which isn’t good for the environment,” she said last year. “We’re here for the monastic life and it is being impinged upon.”

    The new monastery will give its new inhabitants broadband-ready bedrooms for up to 30 nuns, plus a church, library and other ancillary buildings. There is also space for up to 15 guests.

    Smith said the project had been a learning process for the nuns and the architects. “For them it was thinking about buildings in the way we think about them, and for us it was getting to grips with the monastic life. The building is their whole world, they’re there 24 hours a day all their lives and there’s no other building [we have built] that has to meet that challenge. You have to provide everything they could want in life, which is hard. You really want to create a variety of different worlds within it.”

  • Zero-carbon eco home is light years ahead

     

    The world’s first Active House stands at the crest of an estate. Its south-facing roof is covered in solar panels and solar cells, which between them harness more than enough power to keep the occupants warm and the appliances running. In around 30 years’ time, if designers have got their sums right, the excess electricity flowing from the house into Denmark’s grid will have cancelled out the energy costs of building it, leaving a non-existent footprint on the earth’s resources.

    It was conceived as a more comfortable and user-friendly response to the Passive House, which has set the standard for sustainable living in the last decade. These homes, which are popular in Scandinavia, Germany and Austria, rely on incredibly effective insulation, plus a heat exchanger that warms fresh air on the way in during winter. A true Passive House has no conventional heating system because, in theory, it doesn’t need one. In practice, owners tend to install back-up systems, because it’s no fun being cold, no matter how virtuous you feel.

    Rikke Lildholdt, project manager for the Active House, shows me round. “Many people have the idea that if it’s ecological, it must be difficult; you have to grow your own vegetables or whatever,” she says. “This is about living a comfortable life in a house that produces more energy than it uses.”

    Unlike Passive Houses, which are typically only open to the south, there are huge windows on all sides. The cynic in me notes that Velfac, best known in Britain for its skylight brand, Velux, had good reason to commission a design that uses so much glass – equivalent to 40% of the floor surface area and roughly double the average window space. Even on this grim, drizzly day, the rooms are remarkably bright. The triple-glazing cannot match well-insulated walls for heat efficiency, but there’s less need to turn the lights on.

    The solar panels provide hot water for underfloor radiators, but when the sun doesn’t shine, an electric pump kicks in. For eight months a year, the solar cells produce excess energy to sell to the grid. In the winter months, the house buys back electricity – from renewable sources, of course. When a mass-market battery car finally reaches the market, there will be a charger for it in the garage and energy to spare.

    The interior climate is controlled by a computer, linked to a thermostat, which opens and closes windows according to the temperature, season and time of day. Chief engineer Amdi Worm assures me that there is a manual override. “If the occupants open a window, in an hour or so the window will automatically close a little,” he says.

    “If they really insist, they can choose to do it again, but I’m sure that the house will tell them that the way they are handling it is not energy efficient.”

    Sverre Simonsen, his wife, Sophie, and their two children, aged eight and six, will be the first family to live in this nanny home. “We have never been especially conscious about environmental issues,” says Simonsen, “but my wife often asks, ‘Why don’t they invent something new?’ And this is definitely something new.” They will move in for a year on 1 July and have promised to keep a diary of their experiences.

    The house has two flat-screen televisions and a washing machine, but no tumble dryer, in order to meet an energy consumption target of 4,000 KWh per year – a little less than the Danish average. Giving that up is “one of the few sacrifices we have to make, because with kids there’s a lot of washing,” says Simonsen. The dryer in their current home broke down a month ago, so they’re getting used to hanging clothes on a line.

    Lildholdt is coy about how expensive the house was to build, describing it as “the Rolls-Royce version” and insisting that as a commercial product, it would cost no more than a regular three-bedroom detached.

    When pressed, she tells me the bill came to around £500,000.

    “Hopefully we’ll set a standard for what houses will look like in the future. But this is an experiment,” she says. “We’re not building houses, we’re building an idea.” Nine more Active Houses are under construction around Europe. If it can work under the leaden skies of Aarhus, it can work in Britain.