The sustainability world is heating up. Again. After the knocks and twists of the past few years, the climate denying political agenda is now one big yawn.
Businesses are getting down and dirty. They just don’t care about the yabbering going on in Canberra or Washington.
In Brisbane the state government has done all it can to stop sustainability being a driver of the 2032 Olympics, and guess what? The companies likely to be involved are forming their own Coalition of the Willing and doing it anyway. When you think about it, it’s not worth the greenwash risk to do otherwise because any business that hopes to remain in business needs to consider if it can avoid hanging eco-social shingle outside its front door.
But it’s tricky. Occasionally you might think this industry has reached the pinnacle of green buildings – how can they get any greener? Then you hear about the social impact of design, designing for diversity or loneliness, or some amazing new way to create and use renewable energy.
Or, as we did on Wednesday night, you might pop along to a small event in the Sydney CBD hosted by Humanscale, a big US based furniture company that’s recently started carving its way into the Australian office landscape with sustainable products and get a big reminder jolt of how much further there is to go.
Addressing the audience was Laura Hamilton-O’Hara who runs the Living Future Oceania, recently renamed from The Living Future Institute of Australia to take in the ambitious projects now appearing on the New Zealand landscape.
Before she’d gone too deep into her lively presentation Hamilton-O’Hara shocked some of us, at least, by noting the chemicals in our everyday world that lurk in materials, from furniture to building fabric. And noting how slow we are to respond to danger – even, in fact, death threats.
For instance, she popped up a slide with the colour green and nothing else showing and challenged us to guess what its importance was. It turned out to be a very particular kind of green Scheele’s Green. It was invented in the late 1700s and was immensely popular at the time, taking a fast and furious viral ride into stylish interiors, through wall papers and paints, and fabrics. Everyone wanted a piece of the almost iridescent irresistible colour. It was even used in cosmetics and kids’ toys.
Until people started dying. First a young woman who used it to paint with, then a toddler who chewed it.
Turned out it was made from cupric hydrogen arsenite (also called copper arsenite or acidic copper arsenite) or its chemical name CuHAsO3
The interior design industry was the first to ban, it but it took another 10 years for the cosmetic industry to ban it, Hamilton-O’Hara said.
Asbestos took 50 years to ban from the time its death trap ingredients were known, she added. (And why James Hardie, which bitterly fought its obligations coming from the horrible deaths this material caused will never be welcome in these pages).
What is that? What kind of insanity allows us to continue to foist products on an unwitting public when we know it causes harms.
You’ve got to expect that in years to come the future generations will look back on us and see as Barbarians, though that’s probably too much of an insult to Barbarians.
Around us now is more danger. Chrome for instance. In a little gamification after the event the audience took apart a chair and examined it for its material composition.
The group looking at chrome6 learnt that this material is indeed horrid (think the film Erin Brockovich). Quite apart from the damage it causes at its manufacture in furniture it gets knocked, chipped, falls away, attaches to clothes, gets washed and is spewed into the waterways. And hence our amazing magical oceans are ever more degraded.
Hamilton-O’Hara said her organisation didn’t hope to have the entire built environment follow the incredibly challenging process of attaining all seven petals that define the Living Building Challenge because it’s a lot. And really very hard, she admits.
But the point is to try, to show “different” and “better” can happen. And it’s only when one person breaks through the “impossible” barrier that others say, “I can do that too.” Even if the result is not perfection.
There’s a beautiful line in the film Babe where the farmer is training the try-hard little pig to be as good as a sheep dog. The pig strains for perfection (maybe fearing his fate if he fails to be as useful as the woofers). But the farmer pulls him up and says: “That’ll do Pig”.
It’s a good line to remember.
Trying is important. Getting there is not always possible, but near enough is so much better than not trying at all.
Dexus converts offices to student accomm
On another try-hard thank-goodness note, we got news just as our newsletter was about to be put to cyber-bed, that Dexus had completed a project in Brisbane that not so long ago had been cited as too hard, too expensive, too-bad-a-fit: the conversion of offices to residential.
It’s a project that a lot of people will hope is the harbinger of more to come: the conversion of an office tower to student accommodation.
The building is former government offices from the 1970s – you can imagine the challenges; these were not glory years for architecture (but then again, we have not been briefed on its bones, which may be strong and perfect for recycling). But we can see from images it’s thin and that’s a big advantage so you can let light in. Bad luck about those giant floor plates and “villages in the sky” that were so popular a few years ago. However, some people say convert the exterior to resi and leave the dark interiors for labs or some sort of manufacturing. Mixed use! And not far to go to work, you’d imagine.
The building in question is at 41 George Street and at 27 storeys, and now more than 1100 beds, warrants the media statement that it’s “Australia’s largest office tower conversion to purpose-built student accommodation”.
Dexus Group CEO & managing director, Ross Du Vernet, said the project demonstrates what it’s possible to do by harnessing deep “local market knowledge, specialist development capability, and like-minded capital partners who trust us to co-invest and execute on opportunities alongside them.”
Yep, not easy.
And that’s before you get to the bit about how to “reimagine” an “obsolete office building” into something that helps solve the housing crisis and is fit for our future generational leaders and regular citizens (not everyone wants to be boss).
It’s a nice carbon retention story too, with estimates it’s saved about 20,800 tonnes of carbon or about 484 kilograms a square metre, compared with a new residential build of similar size.
The students don’t miss out on fun either – it now has three floors of amenities, “including a gym, yoga studio, cinema and games rooms, and a new exterior inspired by Brisbane’s distinctive local sandstone”.
UniLodge will be the operator and Hutchinson was the builder.
Nice one BNE.
Maybe the developers and the other collaborators can take the state government through a leisurely walk and be given some succinct notes on how you can be good to the environment, to the housing market and still do good business!
