Bathurst Community Climate Action Network

Last week I attended Tech Trade 09 at the Wagga Wagga campus of CSU and as the theme of this conference was sustainability, I thought it was worth reporting on here and passing on some of the lessons being learned by CSU which are worth noting in our community too.
Issues which were covered included building, energy efficiency, renewable energy sytems, community awareness  , carbon polution abatement, food production, biodiversity, transport systems and water conservation.
Although the conference proper was held at the Wagga Wagga campus, we began with a trip to the Thurgoona campus.
This campus which is intended to take over all teaching and research functions originally set up at the Albury campus and introduce many new functions to cater for the rapidly growing area of Albury - Wodonga.

The Thurgoona campus has been designed from inception with sustainability principles underlying all building works, landscaping and energy use.
 
The initial buildings have won several awards for their innovative design. They utilise rammed earth walls for solar thermal storage, large integrated water storage for similar reason, natural ventilation incorporating night purges of the hot air accumulated in the day with the cooler night air, natural lighting.
Solar hot water systems and photovoltaic systems are used to back up energy needs of the buildings.  Composting toilets are utilised within the buildings and water is used in fine misting sprays to assist in the cooling of air on hot days.
For most of the year, these buildings work extremely well, but in the month of February, Albury frequently suffers a period of two to three weeks of very hot days combined with hot nights too which makes the night time cooling of these buildings very problematic.
A recently completed building, which was one of the first half dozen buildings in Australia to pass the six star energy certification processs. This building is an attempt to solve the heating cooling problems of the first phase buildings by incorporating material in the walls which have the capacity to absorb heat when the ambient temperature is high and release it when the ambient temperature cools below a certain point.
As this is a very new building it will be very intereting to see how it performs.
Also of note is the landscaping design on the site. All water used at source is subject to recycling and used again. Water falling as rain, is slowed in its movement over the surface to allow replenishment of the water table and maintain plantings of native species planted for suitability to the site and low water neeeds. None of the walking tracks are paved to allow water penetration and yet these paths are perfectly servicable for wheelchair bound students and staff.
At some stage it would be of interest to this community to have the staff involved in the design and implementation of these systems talk to the Bathurst community and pass on their valuable experience to us.
Also of interest were the path CSU has chosen with dealing with the IT issues of energy usage and disposal of old equipment. The organisation is endeavouring to use its purchasing power to get the suppliers to deliver low energy usage equipement and at the same time implement policies whereby when equipment is written off, it can be rid of all data and non-transferable software and passed on to the public  by auction when still serviceable or passed on to electonic waste disposal companies for recycling of components when the item has no further use.
A plan is also afoot to ship still serviceable equipment to Malia at no cost to CSU.
 
There was a screening at the conference of the British film, "The Age of Stupid". The film poses the world which may exist in 200 years time because humanity as a whole did not react in time to the challenge of climate change. It is a film which could inspire much debate in our community too, so I will see if we can organise a showing of the film here too.
The confernce dinner was adressed by Richard Reid, a director of Riverina F.A.R.M. Pty.Ltd. Richard's concerns are those of agri-business, which I admit are not mine - for reasons I will not go into here, but some of the points raised by Richard are of interest for farmers of all types.

• Growing energy on farm
• Carbon farming and being compensated for it - see calander for upcoming workshops on carbon farming.
• Use of Bio Solids
• Direct seeding
• Use of rail instead of road transport

Finally I would like to mention a piece of research conducted by Penny Davidson and co-workers looking at how energy saving strategies might be best employed with groups of students living in campus accommodation.
I felt the findings of this research could be well employed in all our homes and places of work.
The research involved utilising two separate triggers (and of course with one group - no trigger at all) to engender energy saving behaviour. One trigger used the available technology which showed the energy actually being used as shown on small electical meters. The other trigger involved a social marketing approach of expanation, displaying messages and giving feedback on success or otherwise.
Areas where energy is used and where savings can be made are with heating and cooling, cooking, lights, computers and so forth.
In brief, the results showed that considerable savings could be made, both triggers showed improved behaviour, but the Social Marketing techniques seemed to give slightly better results.
This something we could all follow up and use with in our homes and our work places.
 
Let me know what you think.