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sustainability Dayone

Do you really need to fly? Often, the answer is no as more and more business people are discovering. Teleconferencing is taking over and businesses are saving thousands of dollars by talking to each other through the lens of a video camera. Just one example: Accountancy firm PwC, after quantifying its carbon footprint, found it was largely produced by travel; international travel in particular. It would have had to spend $20,000 a year on carbon credits to offset its footprint, but the firm felt that was akin to paying someone to go on a diet for you. Instead, it invested in video-conferencing and most board meetings and senior management discussions take place by video. Later in this series we will explain how this can be done using Skype. Easy and, even better, at very little cost.

Waste not, want not

Live and let liveIt’s not what we eat

Being grounded is good

oday The Southland Times begins a five-day

series on sustainable living. It sounds worthy (sigh), even a little pompous. It’s not, and it’s important.Sustainable living is

about using the environment we live in to extract as much as we can of what it offers, but without destroying it in the process.So this series is not about making sacrifices, rather it’s about making smart choices to get more out of what we already have. We all have a part in the future-proofing of our communities and environment, at home and in the workplace, by thinking more about the personal choices we make in our everyday lives. It is not about being green, it’s about sustainable living.The south is one of the most beautiful, green, unpolluted places on earth but even here we have problems. Waituna Lagoon is seriously affected by nutrients flooding into waterways throughout that catchment, Solid Energy is charging ahead with controversial plans to mine the huge lignite deposits around Mataura and other companies have given notice that they want to use the even more controversial fracking process to extract shale gas from deep under the Te Anau basin. So we as a community have some tough decisions to make over the next few years, not on how we can block these activities but on how we can make use of our huge resources in ways that sustain our environment for our children and our children’s children.In the meantime, there is much we can be doing, as we will explain over the next five days.

We need energy, lots of it, but boy do we waste it. How many of you golfers keep your clubs in the boot of the car, driving round every day with that extra weight, burning more fuel. Take them out and put them away until you need them, you’ll save money as well as the environment. Walk around your home tonight, or your workplace, and see how many rooms are brightly lit but empty. We waste so much electricity, and money, because we’re careless. Later in the week we will show you how adopting sustainable living practices brings significant savings at home, at school and in the workplace.

How much food to you throw away every day? A study just completed in the United States found that one third of all household food goes to waste _ leftovers from meals, the half cabbage left too long in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, the last of the bunch of bananas that has turned so brown that the kids won’t eat them. All of this stuff is thrown out and, in the south, ends up in the tip generating methane gas as it rots down.But it doesn’t have to be left to produce greenhouse gas. Tomorrow we’ll show you how to turn that kitchen waste into great compost, in the home, at school and in workplaces throughout the region. Innovation is coming

The doom and gloom merchants, and there are more than a few of them, would have us believe the world has become so polluted that it’s irreversible. That’s nonsense. Scientists are developing some extraordinarily innovative products, like the South Koreans who have developed a way to make paper from rock. The process is still at the laboratory stage, so we probably have several hundred years before we need to start fretting about where all our rocky outcrops have gone.In the meantime though we need to be frugal and recycle, recycle, recycle.All southern local authorities are now committed to recycling and they have made it easy for us, with separate bins for our paper, bottles and plastics.

T

Fred Tulett Editor