sustainability street institute - Ellenbrook Village

And then there was Two!! But it wasn’t a waste (nice use of pun) of time. The four of us discussed the waste matrix and came up with great examples to reduce our waste output. We even shifted recycling down a few rungs to expose what is possible before walking out to the yellow lid bin.

And if you are interested, there’s rumour of a 100 days of waste personal quest in Perth, where participants monitor and measure their waste over a 100 days with the idea of observing closely what we use and how we can reduce it – let me know if you want more info.

And to close on a sobering note of inspiration. David Suzuki and his wife produce the amount of waste equivalent to a 1 litre milk carton per month! Wow, after composting, that’s all that needs to leave their premises and get processed off site.

See you Monday 27th at 6pm Grapevine to discuss the sow project and start to wrap this year up.

The Sustainability Street Approach – first in Australia, unique in the world
Ellenbrook Sustainability Street Village
Water Session

To some it might be a dry topic, but it is definitely the word on everyone’s lips at the moment- yes we’re talking about water.

The latest session at Ellenbrook SSA Village, was all about H2O and how we can reduce demands on this precious substance. Dorothy gave a fantastic Communiversity presentation about her garden, including tips on soil- conditioning and waterwise planting. Lots of questions and note taking ensued. This segued beautifully into the guest speaker Cindy Siano from WA Watercorp’s presentation. Cindy gave a fantastic overview of water use in WA and a few of the big projects that are currently in the pipeline...(sorry!) But she also led a great discussion on the best way to reduce demands on water - through simple, cost-free, changes in water use practices in the house and garden. Buckets, mulch, shower-timers anyone!?

Gordon helps Rob shed some light on household energy consumption using pedal power

The Ellenbrook Sustainability Street Village met on Monday evening for a wonderful session on the first area of daily focused effort-energy. The meeting kicked off with a quick game of energy quiz /pass-the-parcel and Dorothy ended up the lucky winner of the energy and money saving thermometer. Stories from the real world were shared about ‘low- hanging –fruit- tree’ pickings. Simple things that had recently been tried at home included; draught stoppers, buckets in showers, and worm farming, to name but a few.

Rob from the eco- shop at WA Environment House gave a wonderfully illuminating presentation on ways to reduce and measure energy use around the home. One of the highlights being Andrew and Gordon using pedal power to show the relative amounts of ‘energy’ used to power halogens, incandescants and compact fluoros. The compact fluoros won hands down for energy saving! (even Cadel Evans would have struggled to pedal enough to keep a halogen downlight going.) Rob did a great job answering the many questions around reducing household energy use.

At the next meeting, Andrew will present on one of the 8 SSA principles, Gordon will write up an article and Dorothy will be the Communiversity Presenter. Margaret has also kindly offered to contact the local Ellenbrook radio, and also the local nature group on the Sustainability Street Group’s behalf.

Stay tuned for more details about the next meeting.

Thanks for coming along last night, you are a great group of people with lots of stories and lots of sustainable knowledge to share. For those who missed last night, you are more than welcome to join us at the next session.

Below is all we achieved last night: We decided we were a Cloud group – still gathering our thoughts and experience in living sustainably - which means we will focus more on learning (mghs_new_new_sml) and a little on teaching. As a group, we decided our community sow project would be a nature WALK.

The walk will point out live examples of plants that are local to the area and can be successfully grown in our garden (and where to get them). We can hand out seeds at the walk to neighbours as well. Over the next few sessions we will develop this idea more. And it would be great to come up with ideas on how to reach and invite fellow Charlottes residents to our walk.

Also, everybody has committed to choosing one low_hanging_fruit target from the list of 101, 001 ways to save the world and will report back next session.