Making waste work harder

Canberra City News
Thursday 21/2/2008 Page: 10

THE word "sustainable" is boring, according to Professor Dr Michael Braungart. For example, if someone described her marriage as "sustainable", pity not admiration might be the appropriate response. Dr Braungart, a process engineer from Universitat Luneberg, in Germany, believes that to aim for "sustainable" solutions means to survive without doing great harm. It is a zero sum - a neutral result. Why not actually improve things instead? The professor was one of a number of experts speaking to the Property Council's 2008 Green Cities Conference at Darling Harbour.

He firmly believes that just getting by isn't good enough, especially when it comes to environmentally sustainable design. Thinking in terms of just achieving sustainability leads to just reducing those actions that harm the environment. "Less bad," he said,"is not good. It's less bad." So instead of aiming to "reduce, avoid, and minimise", our goal should be to "increase, support, and optimise."

Dr Braungart's proposal is to stop focusing exclusively on doing less harm and start focusing on doing good. So rather than using fewer products which damage the environment, we should be developing alternative products which enrich the environment. It just takes a little lateral thinking. His own design chemistry organisation provides intriguing examples. For instance, several fabrics are damaging to the environment, either because of the energy used to make them, or toxic by-products either created in their manufacture or emitted by the fabrics during their lifecycle.

In 1992, Braungart's team set about producing better fabrics. And their criteria for success? The fabric had to be "edible" - its components had to be nutritious rather than potentially harmful. The resulting product actually purifies water while being made, and is now used in the new Airbuses. He said today's green buildings don't need to be carbon neutral and environmentally inoffensive. We can now make them environmentally positive. We can design them to be beneficial. For example, Darling Harbour itself collects all its rainwater, getting more than it needs and sharing the surplus with its neighbours.

Large buildings with their own renewable energy collectors (such as mini-wind turbines and solar collectors) can now provide free, clean surplus power back to the local electricity grid. He said, to effectively enhance our environment, we have to treat everything as potentially good - as a nutrient. So, instead of spending time trying to find ways of harmlessly disposing of waste, we could be finding ways of positively using it to create something good.

For example, he said, you cannot make an energy-saving window without producing some toxic chemicals. So they should achieve more than energy savings to be worth the eco-price of their manufacture. They could be collecting energy for example, or supporting plants which use up carbon and produce oxygen. Other practices he considered silly included recycling paper, or indeed anything that was not specifically manufactured to be recycled in an environmentally effective way.

He also had doubts over certification systems designed to reduce and control incompetencies rather that fostering competencies. He said that doing environmental good is not only intelligent and positive, it is also do-able. "We don't need to apologise for being here," he said. "We need to learn to be natives," fully belonging and contributing positively to the ecology.