The following is the first entry in a series of short personal weekly accounts on how each member of the C4C team is reducing their impact on the environment.

It is only a 3 to 4 hour drive from the nearest point of civilisation as we know it; yet it could be another world. It is the town of Karamea, at the top of the West coast of New Zealand’s southern island. And it’s a place where you can touch what could be the future for the rest of us.

There aren’t a lot of reasons to go there: either you are a travel-blog nerd and you stumbled upon one of the few posts about it, or you’re a serious adventure walker with the will to walk the “Heaphy track”, a gorgeous scenic 4-day hiking trail with no shelter that ends up (or starts) in Karamea. 

Karamea pops up, literally, “at the end of the road”. It’s precisely 100 kilometres from the nearest town, but is an island of community surrounded by a beautiful, green and lush national park. 

So, do people really live here? Absolutely. And this is exactly where things get interesting. As the documentary trailer for Karamea says, “Answers sometimes may be found where least expected”.

The Karamea documentary movie follows the inspiring journey of a bunch of modernhippies that have made this community their home, attempting to “change the world” from one of the most remote places on earth. They might be far away from mainstream civilisation, but this community is tightly knit and passionate about living the way they choose to.

As we meet Karamea’s people, we realise that they’ve managed to live… a little bit differently from the way most of us do. 

Instead of just talking about problems, how the world is drifting away or the social theories and ecological systems to save it, they are putting in practice an actual process toward sustainability where everybody takes their part in this “there is another way to live” project.

This is not a community of old-fashioned hippies, and there are no communal rules that impose how to live and behave with others. Instead, there is private property, and a economic system based on exchange or barter (either it’s food or work) to cover the majority of people’s needs. With fewer places to use it, money is spent wisely and less frequently, leaving no room for conspicuous consumerism.

The pillars of the Karamea lifestyle are also renewable energies, organic agriculture and permaculture design; but it isn’t just about solar power, water supply tanks or “growing your own tomatoes”. 

It is simply a philosophy of “quality over quantity” that the people of Karamea practice in every aspect, following the sustainable living playbook their own way. And the results are staggering: prosperity, community, success, and that elusive goal of people in the modern world, happiness.

Karamea becomes a sort of social, economic and ecological experiment where people can touch what really means to live sustainably. It is such a compelling place that travellers who plan to pass through for a night end up staying for months or years, getting involved in the unpredictable vitality of the town.

This other way to live comes to life through the stories of those that created and are living this dream in Karamea: Is this the end of the road? In 2014, Marco Gianstefani and his crew shot the first part of the documentary, collecting content for a first trailer release and a future crowdfunding campaign that will be launched in early 2016.

[video:https://vimeo.com/125299567]

To share this story with the world, the team is fundraising to complete the shooting and post-production process, and to create the original score so that Karamea can be presented in major international documentary festivals. By telling this fascinating story, we hope to show that the real sustainable living of Karamea is far from the end of the road; it is just the beginning of it.

Background

Imagine that the average U.S. dishwasher is only 65% full when run, but you had the power to ensure that all dishwasher loads were filled to capacity.  Massive water savings and reduced energy consumption come to mind, but what about less detergent use, and scaling back on the substantial resources needed to produce and transport detergent?

By replacing wood and plastic pallets with lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets, we can ensure that U.S. truck shipments are much closer to 100% than currently is the case.  And yet we don’t.

Let’s change that, starting with some directional numbers:   

• • Wood pallets weighing approximately 50 pounds each are loaded with product and shipped on semi-trailer trucks (“semi’s”) 
• • An estimated 5 billion such loaded wood pallets are shipped in the U.S. each year (based on 2 billion pallets in circulation, used 5 times or less)
• • Assuming an average of 20 pallets per truck equates to 250 million truck shipments 
• • Applying the conservative assumption of only 400 miles per trip takes us to 100 billion truck miles per year

How much is 100 billion truck miles?  The equivalent of driving to Mars and back...more than seventy (70) times.

These 250 million trucks, each traveling 400 miles -- and hypothetically weighing 65,000 per truck -- will use over 1.66 billion gallons of diesel and emit nearly 170 million metric tons of CO2e(carbon dioxide equivalent) annually.

Lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets are as effective as other pallets. Photo Credit: Change the Pallet

Corrugated pallets weigh only ~10 pounds, so “changing the pallet” would lower the amount of pallet weight alone shipped each year in the U.S. by ~200 billion pounds.  Doing so would theoretically save 205 million gallons of diesel and emit some 21 million fewer metric tons of CO2e annually (based on a 10% drop in fuel consumption).

While intuitive, this model does not hold in the real world, where vast CO2e reductions are driven by filling space, not reducing weight.

As an architecture student at The Bartlett, UCL, I realised that coffee was being wasted everywhere. Coffee pours out of major urban centres: coffee shops, cafes, office blocks, museums, factories, airports. Anywhere people pass through, huge volumes of coffee grounds were being thrown away into landfill at an enormous economic and environmental cost. In fact, over 500,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds are produced each year in the UK alone, with 200,000 tonnes from London.

Approaching the problem of coffee waste from an outside perspective, and using sustainability as the driving force behind my ideas, I set out to re-imagine this life cycle. The conceptual leap here was to simply turn this problem on its head. I started with the simple premise that there is no such thing as waste, simply resources in the wrong place.

Coffee waste is transformed into useful energy by bio-bean. Photo credit: bio-bean

In two years, bio-bean has become the first company in the world to industrialise turning waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. We have raised several million in finance, built the world’s first waste coffee recycling factory and a team of over twenty people.

[video:https://vimeo.com/151779498]

bio-bean produces biomass pellets, used for heating buildings and in the near future coffee oil that can be refined into biodiesel, used in transport systems. bio-bean’s factory, the first in the world to recycle waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels at an industrial scale, has the capacity to process 50,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds each year. That’s one in ten cups of coffee drunk in the UK every year!

bio-bean is a small company interfacing with large corporations that dominate existing systems (such as the waste management industry and coffee supply chain). As the first company in the world to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds, the policy infrastructure also doesn’t exist to support bio-bean yet. By demonstrating the commercial and environmental advantages of our process has allowed bio-bean to successfully interface with partners at every scale. Most importantly, we have created a fantastic team of people, united under the vision of closing the loop on coffee waste.

The bio-bean process, find out more at bio-bean.com. Credit: bio-bean

bio-bean was set up in response to the challenges of the near future - pollution, transport, housing, food, water, energy, waste, overpopulation, physical and mental well-being equality and climate change - these are not global problems but uniquely urban ones. And if they are caused by cities it will fall to cities to solve them.

The shape of our future and that of our planet depends entirely on how we organise and evolve urban systems. Approaching tomorrow with a spirit of creativity, applying sustainable solutions to create opportunities - this will play a crucial role in all of our futures.

bio-bean is the first company to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds. Photo credit: bio-bean

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bio-bean is an award-winning clean technology company that recycles waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. To find out more visit: bio-bean.com

Connect4Climate participated in the international conference on Communication/Culture and The Sustainable Development Goals (CCSDG): Challenges for a New Generation held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from 17 to 21 December 2015.

The themes of the Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change is very timely, so soon after the COP 21 in Paris. But, as Prof. Rome Chiranukrom, the Vice President for International Relations and Alumni Affairs at Chiang Mai University, reminded us, the focus on the role and place of communication and culture has added additional value to these themes, which are normally monopolized by economics, engineers and politicians. Prof. Rome warned that “the future of our planet and the peaceful and harmonious survival of us as a human race” are at stake! More than a choice on the basis of technology assessments, economic or political models, this challenge appeals on our moral and ethical values as people.

The “new” problems we face may take years, and in the case of climate change, several generations of the world community to resolve. How do we build consensus and muster the altruistic intent of the present generation to consume less, de-escalate conflict, and subject ourselves to medical research so that future generations who will exist long after we are gone may inherit a habitable planet?

The tried and tested methods of agriculture extension, social mobilization, community participation, and multi-lateral negotiation are unlikely to succeed on their own as these systemic problems grow in their severity and people submit to innate human instincts for self-preservation and compete even more keenly for rapidly dwindling natural resources, ratchet-up violence, resist Hippocratic principles to share limited supplies of vaccines and medicines, hoard energy and water, and close markets to international commerce. We do not have appropriate strategies to begin addressing these “new” and highly complex challenges. That’s the challenge the conference participants were challenged to come to grips with in order to formulate realistic and sustainable solutions for future generations.

About 150 people had initially expressed an interest in this conference. After the first selection 70 abstracts were invited to be submitted as full papers. Of these 70, 51 were accepted forpresentation during the conference. Covering a wide range of topics, the presentations were organized in three plenary sessions – “Sustainability Redefined,” “Strategies for Commons Transition and Sustainable Development” and “Learning the Practice of Rural Development Professionalism: Challenging the Professional 2.0,” – and 15 panel sessions ranging from “Mindfulness, Religion and Social Communication” over “Small, slow and big data for Sustainable Development” to “Migration, Ethnicity and Identity,” with special case studies on Thailand, Myanmar and China. After further peer review, a selection of the best conference papers will be published either as special issues in academic journals or considered for book series.

In addition, Action4Climate winning films were showcased in one afternoon as well as presentations on “the Mekong Land Forum”, “Indigenous People and Communication”, “Migrant Workers and Communication”, and “Human Trafficking.”

About 100 participants, coming from ASEAN and other Asian countries like China, India, the UAE, and Taiwan, in addition to scholars from the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, The Netherlands … engaged in lively discussions on the above topics.

The following questions guided the discussions and deliberations:

                     a) How do you make a complex subject like sustainable development or climate change simple and understandable to a general audience?


                     b) What are the main opportunities and challenges you face when trying to communicate to your audiences on the need for sustainability or climate action?


                     c) What is communication for sustainable development, or climate change communication doing right? What is it doing wrong? How can it be more effective?


                     d) What kinds of messages have you used that successfully motivated and engaged people to care about sustainable development or climate change?


                     e) How do we bridge the gap between communication for social change awareness and action?


                     f) How can what you do be scaled up and replicated?


                     g) How do we broaden the discussion and diversify the movement?


                     h) How can we communicate the outcomes of our conference and what needs to happen next
to citizens around the world?

Prof. Jan Servaes presented a set of recommendations for a research/academic agenda for the future of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/start-sustainable-development-goals-academicresearch-agenda-servaes?trk=prof-post

The conference was hosted by the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University in partnership with the Asian Congress of Mass Communication (ACMC), BGreen Project, Connect4Climate, RMIT Melbourne, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) and the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong, and Wageningen University. Additional support was received from UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector both in Paris and the Bangkok office, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Sundrentched fields in South Africa. Photo Credit: Max Thabiso Edkins

In a country where the average rainfall is 495mm as compared to a global average of 1033mm, South Africa is recognised to be a water scarce country. South Africa is a water-constrained country because of low and unpredictable supply, coupled with high demand (we use 98% of our available water resources) and poor use of existing resources (dripping taps, acid mine drainage and sewerage pollution).

Low and unpredictable supply is a common experience in the townships and informal settlements where Afrika Tikkun operates its Youth Development Centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In those areas, water is frequently cut for days and weeks, twice or more a month. This is even worse in households in provinces like Mpumalanga and Limpopo, 63.1% and 61.4% of whom reported on the most frequent interruptions of water services (lasting between 2 and 15 days at a time).

This is a well-documented and highly contested reality for people living in rural areas and informal settlements, who experience “intense inequity in the delivery of water”. Research recently commissioned by the South African Council of Churches show South Africa has worse inequality now than at the end of apartheid.

After 21 years of democracy, those areas which lack water and sanitation mirror apartheid spatial geography: Black and poor former homelands, townships and informal settlements are the areas. This lack of access to water and sanitation has an impact on other rights including rights to dignity, health, and safety. For instance, in many parts of Diepsloot, raw sewerage pours into the streets day and night. This has severe health implications.

Water needed for survival. Photo Credit: Mohamed Bahloul

According to Statistics South Africa's most recent general house survey, only 46.3% of South Africans have access to safe drinking in their houses. Approximately 20.5% of households do not have access to ‘RDP─standard’ sanitation (e.g. flush toilets connected to a sewerage system or a septic tank).

Most of South Africa’s water is used by business, especially agribusiness (57%), mining and other industries (7%). Based on an assessment of the provision of water services by the South African Human Rights Commission, 23 municipalities (9% of the total) were in a crisis state, with an acute risk of disease outbreak; and a further 38% were at high risk, with the potential to deteriorate into a state of crisis.

At the moment households receive 6 kilolitres of free water per month, or 25 litres a day. World average water consumption is 173 litres per person per day. The free basic allowance is enough to flush the toilet twice for a family of eight. Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Patrick Bond shows however that the price of water has more than doubled since introducing the free basic water making it one of the most expensive waters in a third world country.