The Sustainable Living Festival raises awareness and provides tools for change by showcasing leading solutions to the ecological and social challenges we face. Australia’s largest and oldest, the festival attracts a large number of visitors and is staged through the engagement of hundreds of organisations and individuals.
The Green Savings Calculator is a free online tool that helps you work out the cost benefit of sustainable improvements to your home. With methods and data verified by RMIT’s Centre for Design, it covers popular eco-friendly building options including water saving, construction materials and energy efficiency. It can calculate potential dollar savings and carbon savings over one year or ten years, for a typical new or established house.
Sustainable House Day is celebrating its 10th year, and the event will continue to showcase some of Australia’s most sustainable homes to the public as millions of Australians continue to embrace renewable energy, recycling, and other practices suitable to their lifestyles.
The Alternative Technology Association (ATA) Your Home Technical Manual is a compendium with 340 pages of environmentally sustainable solutions for designing and building a home. For people who are building, buying or renovating, it shows how to make a more comfortable home that has less impact on the environment – one that will also be more economical, healthier to live in and adaptable to changing needs. Copies of the updated 4th Edition of the Your Home Technical Manual are now available.
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments. It is about designing households and communities that are productive, sustaining and largely self reliant and have minimal impact on the environment. National Permaculture Day 1 May 2011 is a day where a range of Permaculture events occur across Australia.
The Wollongong Harvest Festival on Sunday 15 May 2011 is a community festival to celebrate local food production, backyard food growing and sustainable food production and consumption. The 2010 Harvest Festival was a great success, attracting over 1500 local residents.
HOPE (Householder’s Options to Protect the Environment) is pleased to announce the launch of its inaugural Pathways to Sustainability Expo in Toowoomba on Sunday, 5 June 2011. The Expo will coincide with World Environment Day and will include information displays, demonstrations and workshops, environmentally friendly products and services and a speakers program. The Pathways to Sustainability Expo is great opportunity for people to find out about the easy changes they can make in their daily lives that can help reduce their environmental impact. Expressions of interest are sought from community groups and businesses wishing to exhibit at the Expo. For further information about the Expo or offers of voluntary assistance, please contact Frank Ondrus on 07 4639 2135 or email office@hopeaustralia.org.au.
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has published the new report Environmental Sustainability: understanding the attitudes and behaviour of Australian households. This report describes research that aimed to understand the water and energy use and waste reduction attitudes and practices of Australian households and how these have changed over time. Although there is a growing body of research investigating the determinants of household sustainability practices and interventions that can positively impact on them, very little of this research has been conducted in the Australian context and there is no systematic examination of how the key socio-demographic variables of tenure, household composition and household income influence household sustainability practices.