Rubrica

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 ...

According to its CEO, Kimbriki is a 'small boutique tip'. For starters, this may challenge what you've always associated with the description 'small boutique', but in the lexicon of waste management, what works for hotels, bars, fashion stores or galleries works just as well for tips. Nestled in bushland between Frenches Forest and Mona Vale in Sydney's affluent northern suburbs, it presents as a showcase of sustainable waste management. The manager of operations, Peter (the default name here is Peter - there seem to be several of them), believes that because of their location the local community has a high awareness of what constitutes good waste management, hence, levels of contamination in the recycling collections is minimal and people are very happy with the councils' four-bin collection system. Certainly, an initial visual inspection of the separate piles of paper and commingled recycling that had come in this morning in the collection trucks revea...

About 10 years ago, when I was starting to get into serious research about waste, I was at a meeting with Tricia Caswell who was then the Director of Global Sustainability at RMIT. In conversation I asked her how I could get more university and industry support for my work in waste. Without a second’s hesitation Tricia said, ‘your problem is that your subject’s not sexy enough. You’ve got to make your subject sexy.”  Caswell knew better than most the importance of making a subject ‘sexy’. As Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation in the 1990s she almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the financially flailing organisation, attracting corporate funding and investment to the environmental peak body and giving it the mainstream appeal and gravitas required to make it a serious player in both the public and private sectors. The problem is, it’s a lot easier to sell koalas, mountain pygmy possums and towering old growth forests to businesses and oth...