Your marketplace for sustainable solutions
This company is doing some wonderful work to make insurance quick and easy for sustainability assessors, auditors and consultants. Once considered “uninsurable”, Anthony Saunders and his team are helping to alleviate the inefficiencies, double and triple handling, and lack of understanding in the sustainability insurance market.
It’s not often we plug reality television shows, but bear with us because this one’s a bit different.
Renovate or Rebuild is the answer to Greenlister CRC for Low Carbon Living’s research on marketing sustainability to consumers and their homes.
According to their behavioural science findings, a large proportion of Australians find sustainability terms such as “carbon emissions” and “greenhouse gasses” off-putting.
As Jess Eva, a fixture in the show and ex-The Block star puts it, “when you think of sustainable homes you usually think of a hale bale and some spiders”.
So, Renovate or Rebuild swaps out these “controversial” terms for more inviting turns of phrase such as “comfortable” or “healthy”. Although green star ratings and passive house technologies are used throughout, the show is more about creating emotional impressions than pushing these specifically.
Host Dr Josh Byrne who is well known in The Fifth Estate for his highly sustainable Josh’s House not to mention his Gardening Australia appearances, says the idea is to get people excited and then bring them to the website where the “rational brain” can kick in to learn more.
Renovate or Rebuild remains “in discussions with Channel 9 regarding a full series on 9Life,” says strategic partner James McGregor.
The pilot of Renovate or Rebuild is available to watch on YouTube.
A partnership between Regis Aged Care and new Greenlister Planet Ark Power will see LED lights and rooftop solar systems installed across 17 aged care facilities around the country.
Pitched to be completed by August this year, the rollout will consist of more than 4400 solar panels. That’s the equivalent of about 33 tennis courts or 8564 square metres in total.
The needs of each site will vary slightly, and Planet Ark Power will take this into consideration, but together they are predicted to have the capability to generate 1.6MWs of electricity
“The installations will enable Regis to offset 20 per cent of their dependence on grid supplied electricity across the residential homes,” Planet Ark Power said, “and around 3,700 tonnes of CO2-e in greenhouse gas emissions.”
For Regis’ national sustainability manager, Dr Kaushik Sridhar, this is as much about producing better energy performance as it is future proofing homes against rising energy costs and regulations.
The Regis and Planet Ark Power partnership is good news for Australia’s ageing population, with other major care providers such as Opal Aged Care rolling out LED lights and solar across multiple sites last year.
We try to keep things positive here at The Green List, reporting on all the good things to come from our Greenlisters and beyond. But sometimes it’s easy to get dragged down by the very real climate threats our world faces as a result of the choices humanity has made.
There’s a term for this rising feeling of concern apparently, and it’s “eco-anxiety”.
Psychology Today describes eco-anxiety as “a fairly recent psychological disorder afflicting an increasing number of individuals who worry about the environmental crisis”.
If this sounds like something you’ve experienced, the new film 2040 might be what we need to shift the narrative a little.
“I think there’s room for a different story,” director Damon Gameau says in the trailer, “a story that focuses on the solution to some of these problems.”
The film offers up some fascinating solutions, such as feeding 10 million people with marine permaculture, as well as highlighting some of its own hypocrisies, such as the use of air travel to film on location despite planes “spewing out carbon”.
The trailer for the film as well as release information is available on 2040’s website.
The International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) has a new cornerstone member in Greenlister dsquared Consulting. Directors Paul Davy and Deborah Davidson are the only WELL accredited professionals in South Australia and are very excited to be convening with “like-minded companies and organisations… [that] are actively supporting the movement towards advancing human health in buildings and communities around the world.”
Victoria is banning e-waste within its general waste stream from Monday 1 July, as part of what’s looking a lot like a sustainability boom, tagging alongside a pretty good regular economy. There’s plenty of good news to be found in its latest budget (see The Fifth Estate round up here). For what the e-waste ban means, our e-waste explainer might help you wrap your head around exactly what e-waste is and how you can treat it in future.
CSIRO has released a report into global plastic recycling, finding one of the largest drivers of growth was from “growing public interest in reducing the environmental footprint of plastic products”. You can read the full report here, or check out our explainer on plastics to find out why they’re so hard to break down. And don’t mention the “accidental” non recyclable waste that Malaysia found in its imports from Oz, nor that it’s sending them straight back to us.
Um, Greenlister CIM Enviro is in the news again. This time by meeting Australian ambassador to Ireland, Richard Andrews, in Dublin to provide insight and advice on the company’s European expansion. As you might have read in last week’s news, CIM Enviro is taking the exciting step and setting up shop in Ireland.
Biopack has partnered with Qantas to help reduce waste to landfill on their flights. We know air travel is a great producer of carbon emissions, so good to see the airline taking a step towards waste reduction by utilising compostable packaging. Check out Greenlister Sustainable Traveller for other ways to reduce your holiday footprint.
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