May 2007 Issue

AWARE
PO Box 975
South Melbourne
Victoria 3205
Contact information

AWARE President’s Report 2007

It is my pleasure to once again take up the position of President of AWARE for 2007. So what have we to do this year?

As I write this report I reflect upon the huge shift in public opinion and heightened state of environmental awareness created through the bombardment of mass media coverage of the devastating impacts of global climate change, and the lively political environmental debate sparked by international economic and scientific reports warning of the impending consequences of our unsustainable approaches to natural resource use.

What a time we live in, 2006 must go down as the historic “tipping point” for the momentum of public support for environmental concern, thank you all for your efforts so far, but if we are to capitalise on this shift we must pool our resources and stay a crest of the wave as it moves forward.

AWARE will be working with you and on your behalf to ensure that your efforts are recognised and celebrated and we will be organising networking events that bring you together to share the latest ideas and inspirations in waste and resource education.

We welcome your input into directions for 2007 so please contact us with suggestions for events, speakers and tours or even better join the executive team!

Gayle Seddon
AWARE President

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What’s coming up

WMAA – Waste Educators’ Working Group (WEWG) and The Young Professionals
ThemeWriting Stunning Grant Applications
DateWednesday 30th May, 3–5pm
WhereMonash City Council, Function Room 1
ContactPat Armstrong – pat.arm@bigpond.net.au
Celebrating World Environment Week
ThemeGET AWARE – Networking for sustainability event featuring guest speakers Robyn Henderson and Tracy Curro and launch of the new-look AWAREness Journal
DateWednesday 6th June, 2.30–5.30pm
WhereTreetops Café, Melbourne Museum, Exhibition Street (Route 86 and 96 tram, Parking underground)
CostFREE – sponsored by Sustainability Victoria
RSVPFriday 1st June to Stan Vermeeren, Mob 0409 499 978 or stan@eedge.com.au
World Environment Day
Theme“Melting ice – A hot topic”
DateTuesday 5th June
WhereVarious locations
Contactwww.unep.org
National Tree Day
DateSchools Tree Day – Friday 27th July
 National Tree Day – Sunday 29th July
WhereVarious locations
CostFree
Who forEveryone
ContactPlanet Ark Tree Day Hotline 1300 885 000 or visit www.planetark.com.au
Keep Australia Beautiful Week
ThemeMobile phone and cartridge recycling, energy saving
DateMonday 27th August to Sunday 2nd September
WhereVarious locations
CostFree
Who forEveryone
ContactLara Shannon on (03) 9592 4001 or visit www.kab.org.au
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WMAA

Waste Education Working Group

Waste Management Association of Australia

The Waste Education Working Group (WEWG Victoria) is a small group of 6-8 people that meets bimonthly with a larger group of about 30 people on an email list.

The WEWG has been busy over the past year. Some highlights of the Group’s activities were:

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LESS Litter Toolkit for Secondary Schools

A new CD ROM resource was released in February 2007 to help secondary schools reduce litter. It is appropriately called the LESS Litter Toolkit, LESS standing for Litter Education in Secondary Schools.

Based on teacher workshops, student focus group research and successful case studies, the toolkit provides an interactive approach to identifying the attitudes and behaviour behind littering and actions to motivate change. A focus of the approach is student involvement.

The easy to use interactive CD ROM provides a step-by-step teaching guide to help students conceptualise, develop and implement their own environmental action plan to reduce litter at their school.

Steps

  1. Advance planning and making a commitment
  2. Assess the current litter problem
  3. Develop a litter reduction strategy
  4. Involve and motivate the students
  5. Implement litter education and reduction at the school
  6. Monitor, evaluate, continually improve and reward

The LESS Litter Toolkit includes over 70 templates, information sheets, instruction sheets, activity sheets and curriculum activities.

The free CD ROMs are being distributed to secondary schools via Education Officers of Regional Waste Management Groups, Council Waste/Environment Education Officers and Sustainability Victoria. Schools are requested to provide some litter data in return for receiving the CD ROM. The toolkit provides litter monitoring templates.

The toolkit was developed by the Metropolitan, Calder and Highlands Regional Waste Management Groups and funded by Sustainability Victoria.

For more information about the LESS Litter Toolkit, phone Marion van Gameren (Metropolitan Waste Management Group) on (03) 9499-6659 or email mailbox@sustainability.vic.gov.au

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The 100-Mile Diet The 100-Mile Diet

Recommended reading

The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment.

When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet was born.

The couple’s discoveries sometimes shook their resolve. It would be a year without sugar, Cheerios, olive oil, rice, Pizza Pops, beer, and much, much more. Yet local eating has turned out to be a life lesson in pleasures that are always close at hand. They met the revolutionary farmers and modern-day hunter-gatherers who are changing the way we think about food. They got personal with issues ranging from global economics to biodiversity. They called on the wisdom of grandmothers, and immersed themselves in the seasons. They discovered a host of new flavours, from gooseberry wine to sunchokes to turnip sandwiches, foods that they never would have guessed were on their doorstep.

The 100-Mile Diet struck a deeper chord than anyone could have predicted, attracting media and grassroots interest that spanned the globe. The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating tells the full story, from the insights to the kitchen disasters, as the authors transform from megamart shoppers to self-sufficient urban pioneers. The 100-Mile Diet is a pathway home for anybody, anywhere.

Call me naive, but I never knew that flour would be struck from our 100-Mile Diet. Wheat products are just so ubiquitous, “the staff of life,” that I had hazily imagined the stuff must be grown everywhere. But of course: I had never seen a field of wheat anywhere close to Vancouver, and my mental images of late-afternoon light falling on golden fields of grain were all from my childhood on the Canadian prairies. What I was able to find was Anita’s Organic Grain & Flour Mill, about 60 miles up the Fraser River valley. I called, and learned that Anita’s nearest grain suppliers were at least 800 miles away by road. She sounded sorry for me. Would it be a year until I tasted a pie? – The 100-Mile Diet

About the Authors

Alisa Smith, a Vancouver-based freelance writer who has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, has been published in Outside, Explore, Canadian Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Utne, and many other periodicals. The books Way Out There and Liberalized feature her work.

J.B. MacKinnon is the author of Dead Man in Paradise, which won the 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. His feature reportage on issues ranging from African prisons to anarchism in America has earned three National Magazine Awards.

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Sustainability Victoria

Sustainability Activity Kit

On 21 February 2007, Sustainability Victoria launched its Sustainability Activity Kit. The Kit has been developed by Sustainability Victoria, RM COM/Earthlines consultancy and Mothers Art to facilitate waste and sustainability education. Based on research assessing existing resources and consultation with Education Officers from Regional Waste Management Groups, the Kit consists of a guide, a model of a sustainable house and a waste and recycling sorting game all designed to be easily transported in a standard car and set up and used by a single person.

The Sustainable House Model is designed to show a typical home and ways people can adopt sustainable living actions by recycling and reducing waste, and saving water and energy.

The Sort It Out – Towards Zero Waste Activity is designed to help people understand what can and cannot be placed in municipal recycling collections and that many other resources can be recycled at venues such as transfer stations. The activity conveys practical ways to save resources by recycling all recyclable materials and not sending them to landfill. The sorting activity also raises awareness about how to dispose appropriately of the hazardous materials that are in many everyday items, including paint and electronics (eg. at Paintback, Byteback or DeTox collection depots).

Councils, schools and community groups can loan the Sustainability Activity Kit from their local Regional Waste Management Group.

For more information about the Sustainability Activity Kit, contact your Regional Waste Management Group.

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Brimbank City Council

Waste management priorities for Brimbank residents

Brimbank City Council is preparing a new Waste Management Strategy for the municipality.

In December 2006 a questionnaire with 16 multiple-choice questions was sent to 500 randomly selected Brimbank households. The impressive response rate of 34% (171 surveys) suggests that waste management is important to Brimbank residents. The questionnaire was also available online at Council website and at Council libraries, which resulted in 42 questionnaires being returned.

The 213 responses to Brimbank’s draft waste management strategy questionnaire shows that the vast majority of residents are satisfied with the information that they receive on kerbside rubbish, recycling and green waste but want more information on litter and composting. Residents get most of their information on Brimbank waste services from local newspapers and Around Brimbank, Council’s community newsletter, which is delivered to every household every six weeks.

There is still some confusion about the things that belong in kerbside recycling bins. One third of respondents indicated that plastic bags can be put in recycling bins and about a quarter believed that plastic films can be recycled.

About half of the people who responded were aware that Brimbank employs bin inspectors and that they can be fined up to $400 if the wrong items are placed in their bins. Slightly less than half the respondents knew that it cost less to recycle than to send material to landfill. Virtually all respondents (95%) agreed that the state government’s target to divert waste from landfill and recycle it by 2014 was important to them.

Respondents said they would visit a hazardous waste disposal (Detox Your Home) one or more times a year and for nearly 70%, Saturday was the most convenient day followed by Sunday.

Brimbank residents rate plastic bags, cigarette butts and illegal dumping as the most significant litter issues. Almost a third of respondents said they would buy a worm farm or compost bin if the price was subsidised by $5 and the proportion of residents did not increase significantly for subsidies of $10 or $15, but went up to 60% for a $20 subsidy. Over 2/3 of respondents said they would bring branches to be mulched if this service was offered. Most residents were unaware of Brimbank’s waste education program in schools.

In response to community consultation, Brimbank has organised workshops on composting and worm farms for libraries, community centres and garden clubs. The plastic bag exchange campaign that began in November 2006 includes using articles in the local papers to address plastic bag litter and the council newsletter to reinforce that plastic bags cannot be recycled kerbside.

Posters are being developed for smoker’s poles which have been installed in major shopping to reduce cigarette butt litter. Articles for Around Brimbank and local newspapers are being prepared on the following topics:

Copies of the questionnaire are available from Brimbank’s Environmental Education Officer Kathleen Kemp – kathleenk@brimbank.vic.gov.au.

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National Action Plan

National Action Plan for Sustainable Development

The Australian Government has begun the process of developing a National Action Plan for Education for Sustainable Development (NAP ESD). The objective of the Plan is to contribute to the achievement of a more sustainable Australia through community education and learning.

The NAP ESD will supersede the existing National Action Plan for Environmental Education, released in July 2000. The existing Plan has lead to the implementation of a broad range of initiatives including establishment of the National Environmental Education Council (NEEC), National Environmental Education Network (NEEN) and Australian Research Institute in Education for Sustainability (ARIES). Development of programmes such as the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative can also be attributed to the Plan. The overarching framework for the NAP is Caring for our Future – The Australian Government Strategy for the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, 2005–2014. Within this framework the NAP ESD will build on current activities and broaden the focus to explicitly acknowledge the interconnected nature of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

The NAP ESD will identify a range of strategies and actions to enable the community to contribute to sustainable development. Specifically, the Plan will outline tasks for which the Australian Government will take responsibility, as well as provide national leadership in encouraging actions by others.

The process for developing the NAP will include an analysis of the current status and needs of the sectors involved in education for sustainable development (or education for sustainability and environmental education), as well as the identification of stakeholders that have not previously been engaged. It will focus on areas of greatest national need and impact.

UrbisJHD has been appointed as the consultant to assist the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Heritage (DEH) with the development of the NAP. The Project Director is Roberta Ryan. The DEH contact is Joan Cornish.

Details of the development process will be highlighted on the project website. In summary, the process will run over three phases:

Phase One – Scoping (December 2006 – February 2007)
Inception process in consultation with Project Steering Committee, NEEC and NEEN. Key Informant interviews. Draft Literature Review. Establish project website. Conduct survey on current situation.

Phase Two – Consultation (March – May 2007)
Disseminate discussion paper. Conduct State and Territory workshops. Present feedback from discussion paper and workshops to Steering Committee.

Phase Three – Drafting of National Action Plan (May – June 2007)
Submit draft action plan. Review by Steering Committee, NEEC and NEEN. Draft final.

Final approval to the new NAP will be given by the Australian Government Minister for the Environment and Water Resources.


HOW YOU CAN BE INVOLVED

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Byteback tour

AWARE E-Waste Tour

Twenty-eight AWARE members visited Boroondara Transfer Station on April 18th for a tour of the Transfer Station facilities, and to see and hear more about the council’s Byteback computer recycling program that has been piloted in Boroondara. Participants learnt more about the program and its successful findings, future directions for e-waste recycling in Victoria and EPR approaches that have been adopted in Europe.

Presentations made by Jan van den Graff, Project Manager, Sustainability Victoria on ‘Byteback and The National Context’ and by Zandy Tibballs, Education Officer, Metropolitan Waste Management Group on E-Waste in Europe can be downloaded from AWARE’s website.

Zandy Tibballs

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Kingston butt campaign

No butts about it

Local shop operators join forces with Council to reduce cigarette butt litter

Kingston Council with the assistance of Sustainability Victoria has implemented an education program to reduce cigarette butt litter along Station Street strip shopping centres. The program kicked off last year in February with an initial audit of cigarette butt litter and concluded in December 2006.

Cigarette butts have been identified as the most commonly littered item. When rubbish is left in our streets it washes into storm water drains that lead to Port Phillip Bay. When deposited in the water cigarette butts leach chemicals and can take up to 12 years to break down.

The program included the installation of new litterbins with trays for butting out of cigarettes and the provision of windproof ashtrays to cafes with outdoor eating tables. Local shops at Carrum and Aspendale have supported the project by distributing personal ashtrays free of charge to customers.

Street theatre characters promoting the anti-litter message amused pedestrians around Carrum train station, handing out mock litter fines and personal ashtrays. Local primary school students stencilled an anti-litter message onto storm water drain lids.

The final litter audit found a 40% reduction in cigarette butt litter compared with the original audit undertaken prior to the implementation of the program.

Similar litter prevention projects have now been successfully completed at the majority of Kingston’s coastal shopping centres. The expansion of the program to non-coastal shopping centres may also be planned for future years.

Council also continues to ensure that windproof ashtrays are included in outdoor dining criteria for cafes and restaurants throughout Kingston and implements the “Healthy Choice Awards” which promote environmental awareness to Kingston’s food businesses.

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Electronic waste

Electronic waste must be regulated,
says scientist

The Federal Government should bring in new regulations designed to reduce the use of hazardous materials such as lead and mercury in electrical goods to prevent them from entering landfill, according to an Australian expert on toxic substances.

Associate Professor Damian Gore urged the government to adopt two toxic waste control programs developed in Europe, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE).

WEEE makes manufacturers responsible for collecting old electrical goods free of charge and disposing of, or recycling them in an ecologically friendly manner.

RoHS limits the amount of six hazardous materials in electronic and electrical equipment – lead, mercury, cadmium, Hexavalent chromium and the fire retardants Polybrominated biphenyl and Polybrominated diphenyl ether.

It came into effect in the EU last July. According to Professor Gore of Macquarie University's Division of Environmental and Life Sciences, similar programs have since been introduced in Japan, China, South Korea and some US states, such as California.

However, he said the Federal Government has taken no action other than to set up a website and commission a survey of businesses.

“It's very difficult for me to understand what has happened here. It's clear that there was an impetus to consider RoHS, hence the set up of the website and the survey, but there's been no change to the website in at least seven months and the report on the survey is many months overdue,” he said.

Professor Gore continued that the survey essentially asked Australian businesses whether they were interested in complying with RoHS, it wasn't a report on what Australia would do.

“If the government is still asking businesses whether or not they're interested then we are so far behind it's not funny – we should already be working on adopting RoHS,” he said.

In addition, without government support he says some local businesses could be unaware of their need to comply with RoHS before exporting to Asia or Europe, and hence face hefty fines.

Electronic waste continues to pose a risk to the environment and public health.

“We've already identified that water resources are important and the Australian Government says it's going to put $10 billion into managing those. Maybe the first step is to stop poisoning them and to stop compromising them for future Australian generations,” he said.

“All of those landfills are leaching hazardous materials. The longer we delay in reducing the input of poisonous materials into those landfills the worse the problem is for our children.”

– Environmental Management News, Friday 30 April

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Sustainable Homes Program 2007

Proposed workshop dates for Banyule, Whittlesea and Darebin + potentially Nillumbik and Manningham.

Workshop Topic Darebin Banyule Whittlesea
2. Create a Water Efficient Home and Garden Tue 8/5 Thu 17/5 Wed 30/5
3. Create an Energy Efficient Home Tue 5/6 Thu 14/6 Mon 25/6
4. Being Waste Wise and Buying Green Tue 17/7 Thu 12/7 Mon 23/7
5. Going Places – Green Travel Wed 8/8 Thu 16/8 Mon 20/8
6. Create a Sustainable Garden Tue 11/9 Thu 20/9 Wed 5/9
7. Showcasing Workplace Sustainability Tue 9/10 Thu 11/10 Wed 17/10
8. Create a Sustainable Workplace Tue 23/10 Thu 25/10 Mon 29/10
9. Sustainable Homes Tour Sun 18/11 Sun 18/11 Sun 18/11

All workshops will be held from 7pm – 9 pm with registrations and finger food (snacks) served from 6.45pm.

All Darebin workshops will be held at: Darebin Council Chambers, 350 High Street, Preston (Melway 18 G 12).

All Banyule workshops will be held at: Edendale Farm, Gastons Road, Eltham (Melway 22 A1) with the Exception of the Waste workshop which will be held at, Rethink, Banyule City Council Operations Centre 307–325 Waterdale Road Bellfield.

All Whittlesea workshops will be held at City of Whittlesea, Council Offices, Fountain View Room, Ferres Boulevard, South Morang (Melway 183 A10).

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AWARE Members Update

Welcome to our new members and a big thanks to the ongoing support from our regular members and sponsors. So who is AWARE I hear you ask? Here’s the latest…

AWARE
PO Box 975, South Melbourne, Victoria 3205 www.aware.asn.au


Executive Committee Members:



Members: Corporate member = Corporate member



Stan Vermeeren
AWARE Member Support – stan@eedge.com.au

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