Ralph Horne

Routes of Reuse of Second-hand Goods in Melbourne Households

Abstract While various Australian state governments have set targets for the reduction of waste to landfill, the emphasis to date has been placed mainly on the development of bulk materials recycling industries than on other strategies for waste reduction such as the reuse of second-hand goods. Many second-hand channels are informal and do not involve market transactions, making it difficult to collect information that could identify patterns. In this paper we report on the findings of a survey conducted with 306 Melbourne households about their practices of acquiring and disposing of used household goods. Our survey results confirm the importance of both formal and informal channels for the circulation of second-hand goods among Melbourne households. Socio-demographic characteristics such as household composition, employment status, education level and country of birth, along with infrastructure issues, such as dwelling types and residential tenures, are significant predictors of the use of various second-hand channels. A fuller understanding of the routes of reuse of second-hand goods will require grappling with complex intergenerational and gender effects, and large differences between types of dwellings, systems of infrastructure and living situations among Melbourne householders.

Dwelling performance and adaptive summer comfort in low-income Australian households

ABSTRACT Increasing reliance on air-conditioning to improve summertime comfort in dwellings results in higher energy bills, peak electricity demand and environmental issues. In pursuit of social equity, society needs to develop ways of improving cooling that are less reliant on air-conditioning. Designing homes to emphasize adaptive thermal comfort can reduce this reliance, particularly when combined with improved dwelling thermal performance. A multi-method evaluation of 10 low-income dwellings in the state of Victoria in Australia is presented, including low-energy and ‘standard-performance’ houses. The combination of performance monitoring and householder interviews reveals new insights for achieving summertime comfort. The low-energy houses without air-conditioning were both measured and perceived as more comfortable than the ‘standard-performance’ houses with air-conditioning. The low-energy households achieved improved personal thermal comfort through a combination of improved fabric performance augmented with adaptive comfort activities (e.g., opening/closing windows). This outcome reduces reliance on air-conditioning, reduces living costs and energy consumption, and improves environmental outcomes. There is a need to integrate lessons from adaptive thermal comfort theory and strategies into minimum building performance requirements and standards, as well as wider design strategies. It is evident that adaptive comfort has a role to play in a transition to a low-carbon housing future.

Transition to low carbon? An analysis of socio-technical change in housing renovation

Across the westernised world, concerns about climate change and resource scarcity point to the need for widescale changes in housing renovation. Through the exploration of social interactions of eco-renovation businesses on the ground, the paper presents evidence for the emergence of an ‘eco-renovation niche’ consisting of both traditional and new types of housing industry businesses. However, this niche is not clearly bounded, stable or homogenous, and so generalised ideas about how it may grow in scale or size are problematic. Niche participants typically wish to stay small. Also, complex household relations are involved, and hands-on experimentation is a feature of the industry participants. For policy purposes, this suggests a need to focus on strategic intermediaries in industry and professional associations, licensing bodies and regulators, who could in turn support programmes that more adequately recognise the modus operandi of the industry, households and civil society organisations.

Low carbon, water-efficient house retrofits: an emergent niche?

Rising carbon and water footprints of housing present a significant policy challenge across the Westernized world, and this has led to a growing range of government policies and programmes designed to promote greater residential energy and water efficiency. An analysis of low carbon/energy renovations is presented based on interviews with homeowner renovators and project managers in Australia. The renovators included self-declared ‘green renovators’ and other, more typical ‘general’ renovators. The project managers included a range of builders, designers, coordinators and retrofitters who provided specialized low carbon/water renovation services. Using the idea of niches and multilayer perspective (MLP), the analysis reveals both the limits to government initiatives promoting low carbon/water renovations and the importance of aspirations and relations in the low carbon/water housing renovation niche. The use of deep enquiry using semi-structured interviews reveals a detailed picture of these relations that cross the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of housing renovation. These relations reveal interdependence and tensions that profoundly shape low carbon/water renovations. Such relations should be explicitly accounted for in the design of government programmes and regulations.

Urban Sustainability Transitions

The central question for this chapter is: how can urban and transitions perspectives assist understandings of low carbon housing and urban change? Current ‘urban’ and ‘transitions’ perspectives are presented along with recent and current attempts to bring urban and spatial perspectives to transitions studies. Australia as a site for urban transitions studies is considered, and three aspects of low carbon housing and urban change are highlighted: policy settings and governance, spatial/urban dimensions and carbon and consumption context. Contributions of urban and transitions perspectives to understanding low carbon housing and urban change are explored through two case examples of low carbon housing and urban change in Australia: photovoltaic panels on domestic rooftops and broader retrofitting and renovation activity towards low carbon housing. Transitions perspectives include the multilevel perspective and Transition Management. While these vary, the focus here is that they can each provide useful insights when coupled with other perspectives of urban and social change. Power, space and consumption all feature in practices of urban low carbon transitions, and it is essential that further analytical tools are brought to bear in these domains. They offer a scale for the study of cultural projects where change is as likely to be associated with cultural or social change as by policy settings.

Cost efficient low-emission housing: implications for household cash-flows in Melbourne

A number of international jurisdictions have articulated a longer term goal of zero emission housing standards. However, in Australia, housing energy efficiency remains a contested policy area. In part, this is due to a lack of clear cost-benefit information on low emission housing standards, including impacts at the household level. This research investigated the lifetime economics of low emission housing options for typical housing in Melbourne, Australia. The analysis found that for a zero emission house, there was an additional capital cost of

Ordinary vertical urbanisms: City apartments and the everyday geographies of high-rise families

25,637. This translated into extra yearly mortgage repayments of

Assessment of social vulnerability to climate change at the local scale: development and application of a Social Vulnerability Index

2,117 at an interest rate of 7.89% across 25 years. However, energy efficiency cost savings of

Megacity Dhaka: ‘water security syndrome’ and implications for the scholarship of sustainability

1,547 a year were calculated, leaving a gap of

Urban Sustainability Transitions: An Emerging Hybrid Research Agenda

570/year in additional mortgage repayments. As a result, policy makers in Australia should focus on reducing upfront costs and developing innovative financial frameworks in order to make low emission housing achievable.