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Category Archives: Sustainability

Plastic Bag Ban in Queensland Gets Green Light as Cash-for-Cans Scheme Introduced

Queensland shoppers will no longer be able to get plastic bags at the supermarket but will be able to cash in their cans and bottles under laws passed overnight. The ban on single-use plastic shopping bags, including degradable and biodegradable bags, will take effect from mid-next year. The bill was passed with bipartisan support, with the Opposition saying it had initially proposed the changes. Environment Minister Steven Miles said some retailers were proactively banning the supply of lightweight plastic shopping bags in advance of the ban. Retailers who flout the laws face up to a $3,000 fine. Designated container refund …

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Greening the Concrete Jungle: How to Make Environmentally Friendly Cement

Cement is the world’s most widely used material apart from water, largely because it is the key ingredient in concrete, the world’s favourite building material. But with cement’s success comes a huge amount of greenhouse emissions. For every tonne of cement produced in Australia, 0.82 tonnes of CO₂ is released. That might not sound like much, especially when compared with the 1.8 tonnes emitted in making a tonne of steel. But with a global production of more than 4 billion tonnes a year, cement accounts for about 8% of the world’s CO₂ emissions. The electricity and heat demands of cement production are responsible for …

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Germ-Zapping Plant Tackles Antarctic Waste

The Australian Antarctic Division has unveiled a wastewater cleaning plant that will help lessen the environmental impact of remote researchers. A million dollar germ-zapping machine will purify the wastewater of Australian researchers in Antarctica. Built in two shipping containers, the technology was unveiled in Hobart on Tuesday following a two-year trial. It will set sail this summer on icebreaker Aurora Australis en route to Davis research station. “Once installed, this will be the best treatment system in Antarctica,” Australian Antarctic Division engineer Michael Packer said. The plant puts kitchen and human wastewater through a process of ozone and ultraviolet disinfection, …

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Urban Runoff and Water Sustainability in Urban Design

The issue of conserving our environment is a complex one. While reducing our material usage, reusing what already exists and recycling other products are all valuable steps towards reducing the impacts of climate change, they cannot be the only strategies adopted in an integrated approach. Sustainability is not just a matter of products. A holistic approach must also encompass how the built environment responds to its context and to its inherent natural processes. This is more important than ever, as extreme weather events become more frequent, placing extra stress on – and accelerating the degradation of – both our natural …

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Liberated Leaders: Leading Through Growth, Change and Disruption

Are you an ‘already’ successful business leader with a strong vision for the future, experiencing challenges in the current business environment, spurred on by growth, change and disruption? If you want to build a future-ready workforce, Liberated Leaders would love to help.  Liberated Leaders is an applied Leadership Program with a special focus on skills, practices and capabilities to navigate change and disruption. We offer leaders greater confidence and skills to lead through change and disruption, to foster an aligned and engaged team, ensure business relevance to secure customers (now and in the future), build capacity to engage in any conversation …

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How the Search for Mythical Monsters Can Help Conservation in the Real World

After fears the Loch Ness Monster had “disappeared” last winter, a new sighting in May 2017 was celebrated by its enthusiasts. The search for monsters and mythical creatures (or “cryptids”) such as Nessie, the Yeti or Bigfoot is known as “cryptozoology”. On the face of it, cryptozoology has little in common with mainstream conservation. First, it is widely held to be a “pseudoscience”, because it does not follow the scientific methods so central to conservation biology. Many conservation scientists would find the idea of being identified with monsters and monster-hunters embarrassing. Moreover, in the context of the global collapse in biodiversity, conservationists focus their attentions …

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‘Limitless Applications’: The ‘Magic Powder’ That Could Prevent Future Crises

It sounds like a distant dystopian crisis: a world where global food and water supply chains buckle under the strain of overpopulation and climate change, before being contaminated by weapons of mass destruction unleashed in a desperate fight for access to what little is left. While the crisis may not be as unrealistic or far away as it seems, scientists are already coming up with potential solutions. One is the curiously named metal organic frameworks (MOFs), a powder of nano-engineered crystals with an apparently endless variety of uses. One teaspoon of these crystals contain the surface area of an entire football field, and scientists …

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Community Energy Opportunities in Regional Australia

In 2016 the ACT government committed to a target of 100% renewable energy by 2020, moving the target forward and reflecting a growing commitment by sub-national and local governments, and city administrations to changing their energy dependencies and the energy mix, and decentralising the energy production process (reference – Paris Council of the Parties on Climate Change in 2015). Governments are recognising the growing interest in renewable energy in their constituencies, and in fact the public is arguably leading the political agenda. The regional Victorian experience in relation to community energy is instructive. Daylesford began a conversation about two community …

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Clever Regions, Clever Australia – Enhancing the Role of Regional Universities

Dr Caroline Perkins, Executive Director, Regional Universities Network The Australian economy is moving from a heavy reliance on mining and manufacturing to a new era in which skills, knowledge and ideas will become our most precious commodities. The jobs and industries of the future will need highly skilled university graduates who can connect regional Australia with the global, innovative economy. The six regionally headquartered universities of the Regional Universities Network (RUN), CQUniversity, Federation University Australia, Southern Cross University, University of New England, University of Southern Queensland, and the University of the Sunshine Coast, make a fundamental contribution to their regions. …

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Adaptive Sustainability – Business Management in an Age of Disruption and Transformation

There can be no doubt that organisations today operate in a dynamically changing business environment. Companies are getting disrupted at an unprecedented rate with managers and their staff struggling to keep up with new technologies, new business models, new economic and regulatory challenges, and the consequences of the hyper connected digital world. At the same time social responsibility and environmental sustainability are fast becoming a critical part of doing business.  Effective engagement using sustainable business frameworks not only enables an organisation to deliver on its social and environmental obligations, it can also maximise productivity and performance by having positive impacts …

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