Environmental sustainability is our responsibility

I am writing this on a plane to London – 24 hours of enforced inactivity – plenty of thinking time. I have a jammed week of meetings with our UK resellers ahead and this may be one of the only times I get for a rant.

Before I left I checked the level in our water tank. We have a modest 3000 litre tank in the back garden fed by the runoff from the main living area roof. It is connected to a smart little pump system that feeds the water to the toilets and the washing machine. If the tank runs low a sensor kicks in a “Rainbank” device that diverts the feed from the mains water instead. Cool, hey? The problem with Sydney is rain is infrequent but torrential – it pours down for a few days and the tank fills up rapidly – then it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. Four weeks ago the tank was full to the brim, this morning there was about 10 days left before the sensor would be exposed. That’s important to me at the moment because the sensor is faulty and I want to replace it when the tank empties out but must make sure not to run the pump dry. That’s one of the little things we do around our place for environmental sustainability and it should pay itself off in 15 years unless the cost of water skyrockets! I would love to go the solar energy way and feed kilowatts back into the grid but the cost is mind blowing – and in a country like Australia it should be a no-brainer.

On the plane I have just read a newspaper article giving dire warnings of the world’s impending doom as the populations of India and China grow their economies at such an exponential rate that their demand for the world’s resources increases in a generation at the rate that the western world saw over hundreds of years.

On the radio in the taxi on the way to the airport I heard some of the federal government “question time” – generally boring as and mindless with the Dorothy Dixer rubbish that they set up for themselves – that woman has a lot to answer for (whoever she was). One of them was pounding on about the exciting events that took place in January when 6 of the countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Convention on greenhouse gas control and reduction – Australia shamefully being one of them, others I think being China, India, Korea, USA and Japan (known jointly as “AP6”) – got together to chinwag about what could be done to lessen the destruction of the world as we know it.

Earlier, at the school bus stop, I was talking to another school dad who is working with a company that is aggregating a bunch of small rural manufacturing and distribution companies across the country to build a coast to coast backyard environmental supplies chain – water tanks, grey water systems, sewage management, solar power devices etc – great idea.

Last weekend I was shopping for some big chunks of foam rubber seating (riveting I know but the window seat demands cushions) and the extremely helpful and knowledgeable shop owner said “buy now because in February the prices are rising 15%”. Apparently foam rubber has a critical component called TPD – or maybe TDP? –and this is of course a by-product of oil and only made by three companies worldwide (Dupont being one) and (take a breath here!) China’s demand for this substance is such that the supplies for the rest of the world have been frozen at current levels and all increased capacity is going to China (and presumably India when they work out how obviously precious it is). There must be a huge demand for window seat cushions in these developing countries.

In November 2005 I was at a breakfast seminar where the keynote speaker was Jack Knight of Frank, Knight, Sinclair fame – a helluva nice guy it seems. He was saying that Shanghai has more multi-story construction cranes in operation at the moment than the rest of the world put together.

The New South Wales government has been threatening to build a water desalination plant to lessen the threat of massive water shortages for Sydney in the coming decades – then magically this week they announced the discovery of a new aquifer in the Sydney basin that will “never run out” – that sounds like politico talk to me.

Where am I going with this? – I seem to be rambling – but hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. There just seems to be a constant noise these days about our voracious consumption of the planet we stand on. What sort of a world are we chewing up and spitting out for our kids? Will anything be left for my far off grand children? We each of us need to be doing more to maintain the resources we have.

Innovation and invention in new technologies to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and increase the output and affordability of renewable resources should be given greater incentives and broader support. We all need to look at our own consumption patterns for ways off reducing waste and our drain on natural resources.