Rubrica

We can hide it, pretend it will go away, throw a tablecloth over it and pretend it’s not an elephant, but we can’t escape the fact that our technology habit is trashing the planet. That gaming system that was so hot last year but is now just so last year? The mobile phone now superseded by a brand new smart phone? The 3-year old flat screen TV that had to go to make way for the new plasma HD? Computers, monitors, MP3s, PDAs, netbooks, notebooks, digital cameras, printers, copiers, digital photo frames – all consumer electronics, in fact, up to and including large household appliances. E-waste is the most pressing waste management challenge we face. E-waste is classified as hazardous waste. It contains numerous heavy metals and toxic materials including lead, mercury, cadmium, cobalt, arsenic, lithium, chromium VI, chlorofluorocarbons, nickel and asbestos. It also contains valuable and recoverable metals such as gold, silver and copper, as well as a lot of plastics. It will never b...

Every culture has them: people who exist on other people’s garbage. From Steptoe & Son to Manila’s Smokey Mountain, there is always a group, or class, of largely unseen people who make a living or eke out an existence by picking up what others have discarded. Zabbaline boys on the outskirts of Cairo In Cairo the zabbaline (roughly translated as ‘people of the rubbish’) are a specific social class belonging to a religious minority (Coptic Christians) and who acted as the city’s unofficial garbage collectors for most of the 20 th Century. Recyclable materials such as metals, plastics and glass are saleable on the open market and other salvaged items sold in the marketplace. In 2003 the Cairo city council decided to formalise waste management by outsourcing it to multinational companies. The result was a collapse in the sustainability of the zabbaleen community, which was subsequently locked out of the market and denied access to their main economic resource. The fate of the z...

Some time ago I wrote an article for The Conversation , an online journal, about the ACT government’s ban on plastic shopping bags which is due to take effect on 1 November. In the article I suggested that this policy move was little more than a high profile litter campaign and will achieve virtually nothing in waste minimisation. I also commented that the ACT had slipped from national leader in waste policy to laggard. A few days after the article was published a representative of the government’s Department of Territory and Municipal Services phoned me to complain about the article, told me that I obviously hadn’t read their waste management strategy (in fact I was, and am, very familiar with it) and that they were still national leaders in waste. Unfortunately, the only area in which the ACT still leads Australia in waste is in its production, judging from an article* in yesterday’s CanberraTimes . Such sensitivity to criticism of policy is uncommon in governments – hides like rh...

 Very little of what arrives on site at Kimbriki in cars, utes, trailers and trucks is actually garbage. Most of it – around 70% of it, in fact – is diverted before it reaches the landfill. Garden waste is dumped at the vegetation area and is composted or mulched with the products then sold on-site. Recyclable material is dumped in the designated areas for cardboard and paper, glass and plastic, motor and cooking oil. Wood waste is either salvaged or is chipped and then sold for landscaping. Concrete, tile and brick are crushed for gravel and sand and sold on site. Metal, e-waste and tyres are collected separately and sent off-site for recycling. The tip even occasionally collects whole cars which are used by the emergency services as training for cutting open vehicles in emergency situations. The landfill is the last line of disposal, but even then, the Buy Back Centre can recycle an incredible amount of waste retrieved from the tip. The interesting thing is that even though some...

Question: what do this city (top right) and this 1930s garbage incinerator (bottom right) have in common? Answer: their designer. Yes, the same husband and wife architect team that designed Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, also designed the garbage incinerator that was constructed at Pyrmont in Sydney in the 1930s to solve a mounting and very smelly problem. Let’s go back a few years … The earliest garbage tip in Sydney was Moore Park: to be precise, the current playing fields of Sydney Boys’ High. The debris and detritus of the growing urban area was dumped at Moore Park, periodically burnt to control odour and vermin, and was largely out of sight and out of mind. Unless you happened to live or work in the vicinity. In about 1900 an outbreak of bubonic plague meant the City of Sydney administrators suddenly needed to improve the city’s sanitation in a big hurry. The first step to help contain the growing problem of waste disposal was an incinerator at the...

A couple of weeks ago the television program The Renovators screened an episode* where two teams of amateur renovators were challenged to build a site shed at a tip using only materials found on site. The tip in question was Kimbriki, and the two teams, under the guidance of sustainable house guru, Michael Mobbs, were provided with identical bare frames from which they had to construct sheds. Each shed would have solar panels for power and the renovating teams had to consider sustainability design aspects as well as the materials to be used. The episode was actually shot a couple of months ago so the two little sheds have been sitting in the bare expanse of the landfill area for some time now and are starting to show the effects of the environment and also the, ahem, workmanship. Today I learned the background story to what appeared on the TV show and as this is a blog about stripping bare our consumer culture and revealing what happens behind the scenes, I am going to share some ...

Peter Rutherford is a man on a mission. He manages the Kimbriki Eco House and Garden, a demonstration and education site at the Kimbriki tip: a building and garden made almost* entirely from materials recycled from the tip site and which is a little oasis of peace and positive energy surrounded by the constant industrial activity of the rest of the operations. Peter's philosophy for the Eco House and Garden From a farming background, Peter moved away from chemical agriculture having seen first-hand its effects on human health. He then trained as a teacher and taught agriculture in secondary schools for a while before ultimately moving into an area where he can combine his agricultural and teaching skills with his driving passion for healthy soil and low-impact living. I had the great privilege of tagging along behind Peter this morning as he introduced a group of primary school-aged kids from neighbouring Ku-ring-gai Council Vacation Care program to the importance of earth ...