Old to new – a star turnaround

Canberra’s Trevor Pearcey House, the third refurbed building in Australia to rate a six star ‘Green Star Office Design’, has won the Banksia Built Environment Award. The refurbishment, on a conventional budget, produces about 70% fewer greenhouse emissions than an average commercial building and uses about 75% less water. The new headquarters of Australian Ethical Investment used accepted, conventional and low-technology design principals, technologies and materials.

“This is a leading example of sustainability in the refurbishment of an existing building,” said Howard Pender, executive director of Australian Ethical. “The original building was over 20 years old, and we wanted to show how it was possible for a similar cost of a normal refurbishment to transform an ordinary suburban strata office into a state of the art sustainable office, whilst never forgetting that the productivity and comfort of the people who work there is paramount.” 

The atrium type area on the first floor forms a control for natural ventilation, day lighting and activity, while light columns (stacks) connect through to the ground floor.  Air is drawn into the building either through either manual window hoppers or mechanically using electrically operated windows or louvres controlled using a weather station. Radiators and ceiling fans provide focused temperature control, while back up air conditioning on the first floor is locked and requires consensus by staff before use.

Windows and air stacks are used in conjunction in summer nights to purge the building of hot air build up during the day. Different forms of shading have been provided to each elevation to reduce direct solar gain while still obtaining indirect light.

As a base lighting system, office areas have been provided with high efficiency, low brightness, semi-specular, louvred luminaries with T5 lamps that use 40% of the energy of normal lights. Lighting is also timer and occupancy controlled to allow lights to be switched off when not required. The base level lighting is low and supplemented with task light at individual work areas.

One of the most interesting features has been the level of recycling and reuse of materials. The architects (Collard Clarke Jackson Canberra) and construction managers (Cobul Constructions) worked collaboratively to ensure as many materials as possible were reused in the construction, including:

• Electrical wiring ducted skirting, power point and switch face plates;
• Partition wall studs, plasterboard and frames for windows and doors;
• Internal doors, door handles, door stops and internal glass blocks;
• Carpet tiles were reused and supplemented with more recycled carpet tiles;
• Steel hanging frames and mesh found in the ceiling space and were reused to make a bike enclosure;
• 90% of the joinery cupboards were made from old cupboards found in the building; and

Recycled timber was used for feature floors and walls. Story sourced from www.EnvironmentalManagementNews.net

A car park as a water tank?

With more and more cars, we always need more spots to park. But hard surfaces such as carparks and roads mean big bursts of stormwater when it rains. These bursts stress our water infrastructure, flood low spots, damage creeks and sweep huge amounts of pollution from our streets into the ocean. But what if the carpark could work for you rather than against you?

Imagine a carpark that catches the water from a storm, filters and cleans it, lets some go back into groundwater and sends the rest into your water tank ready for restrictions-free gardening. The Pervious Paving Carpark at CERES Community Environment Park is doing just that.

Two different types of possible car park surfaces have been tested for fifteen months and the results are in. You can grow grass under your cars or do it with concrete, but the analysis by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) researchers shows pervious paving works: recharging groundwater, slowing and reducing the flow by more than half, removing more than 90 percent of some nutrients and reducing heavy metals to below detectable levels.

"Pervious paving is a really effective way to manage urban stormwater runoff and recharge groundwater", says Dr Nira Jayasuriya of the School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at RMIT. "They filter the water as well as hold it and slow it. Both types of paving reduced the oil and suspended solids by 90% or more, and the total runoff dropped by up to 60% compared to a normal carpark. In fact, the runoff dropped so much that out of 43 storms we only had seven storms heavy enough to measure results from. So as storms get more severe with climate change and we get bigger downpours, these kinds of paving are going to make a big difference to whether your car gets caught in flooding, or whether you have to wade to it if you parked at the low end of the shopping centre."

And the water works for CERES staff, visitors, and local community. "In the last year we've caught approximately 164 kilolitres of stormwater from our tiny carpark", says Tiki Swain, Green Technology Coordinator at CERES.
"Some of that water we're trialling using in our community gardens, so people can grow their own vegies without being limited by the tough mains water restrictions."

CERES visitors benefit from the extra stormwater caught. "There's families picnicking by the catchment dam, admiring the flowers growing in the pond, it's a beautiful nature space that's not costing mains water to maintain," says Tiki. "We had around thirteen thousand school students joining in water studies at CERES last year, doing things like testing the water health and looking at the insects that live in water bodies. They love the activities in the dam."

CERES hopes to extend the off-mains irrigation system right through the community gardens, with the potential to save several hundred kilolitres of mains water should sufficient rain fall. "We'd hoped to catch a lot more water, but the drought meant not nearly as much rain as we'd have liked. So saving mains water with pervious paving is still going to depend on whether it rains."

The Pervious Paving carpark project was funded by a Stormwater and Urban Water Conservation Fund grant from the State of Victoria. Research, data collection and analysis was carried out by the School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering from RMIT. For more information contact: Tiki Swain, CERES Green Technology Coordinator, 0429 865 724, tiki@ceres.org.au or Sandra Castro, CERES Marketing Co-ordinator sandra@ceres.org.au

With thanks for the article from Glen Moore, Director Wollongong Science Centre and Planetarium http://sciencecentre.uow.edu.au

Shut down electricity contracts to reduce need for power plants?

With the pressure on to meet not only greenhouse targets but provide new power for peak usage requirements, some creative ideas are being considered by various organisations.
A strategy that may suit some businesses is signing interruptible contracts, where they get a discount to agree to switch off their energy a handful of times a year to help the grid manager flatten out the power peaks, avoiding expensive infrastructure upgrades.

In NSW, TransGrid has recently given this concept its highest level of acceptance by contracting Energy Response to sign up major electricity users, with likely candidates being scrap metal processors who could turn off a shredder, firms with well-insulated cool rooms who could cope without power for an hour, and facilities with back-up power.

Not all energy is electricity, of course. Maribyrnong Council has looked at liquid fuels and not liked what it found. The Melbourne is one of the first to develop a comprehensive peak oil plan, looking at various scenarios under a petrol crisis and developing internal and external responses.

It ranges from more locally grown foods and an influx of people to the inner western suburb to reduce their commute, to downsizing vehicle models in the council fleet and in a crunch allowing council staffers to work from another council’s offices to reduce their trip to work

Whether it’s crisis planning or simply cost control, energy use and its resultant greenhouse emissions is becoming too hot to ignore.

Story sourced from www.EnvironmentalManagementNews.net.  More on these stories and others at WME Environment Business Magazine.

Zero waste – a Japanese reality or dream?

The Mayor of Kamikatsu, a small community in the hills of eastern Japan, has urged politicians around the world to follow his lead and make their towns "Zero Waste". He said that all communities could learn from Kamikatsu, where residents have to compost all their food waste and sort other rubbish into 34 different categories. Residents say the scheme has prompted them to cut down on waste generally and food waste in particular. If the policy spread, it would reduce the amount of food waste, and so take some of the pressure off high food prices.

Kamikatsu may be a backwater in the wooded hills and rice terraces of south-eastern Japan but it's become a world leader on waste policy. There are no waste collections from households at all. People have to take full responsibility for everything they throw away.

Kitchen waste has to be composted. Non-food waste is processed either in local shops which accept goods for recycling or in Kamikatsu's Zero Waste Centre. There, people have to sort their unwanted items into 34 different boxes for recycling. For example, old curtains or kimonos are expertly converted into bags.

Residents have to sort plastic bottles (used for fruit juice, for example) from PET (polyethylene teraphthalate) bottles (used for mineral water) because PET is more valuable when it is separated out. There are specific boxes for pens, razors and the sort of Styrofoam trays on which meat is often purchased. These have to be washed and dried.

The scheme was adopted when councillors realised it was much cheaper than incineration - even if the incinerator was used to generate power. Questions remain about the scheme. Some of the composters are boosted by electric power, which creates greenhouse gas emissions. Also it's possible that the savings in greenhouse gases from recycling are negated by the need for people to drive to the Zero Waste Centre. Natsuko Matsuoka, one of the originators of the centre, disagrees - she says people generally tie in the journey with a weekly shopping trip.

Sourced from WMAA [e-news@wmaa.asn.au]  www.resourcesnotwaste.org

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