The rising popularity of eco projects
A group of enterprising and forward-thinking Christchurch people are showing just what can be achieved when it comes to eco projects. reports.
Renovating a character home is a tough project, but when Nisha Duncan and Evan Chadwick bought a rambling 1910 villa on Hereford St, they threw in an extra challenge: converting it into an eight-room B&B with a focus on sustainability. It sounds admirable, but daunting.
The couple had stayed in eco accommodation in other towns and had been Airbnb hosts at their home in Linwood. ‘‘We really enjoyed hosting people and we felt that it was a unique opportunity to show people a different way of living,’’ Nisha says.
As a former outdoor instructor, she had spent plenty of time in eco and off-grid communities around New Zealand, so when she and her partner spotted this ‘‘grand, old lady’’ for sale in early 2015, it seemed a good business opportunity.
‘‘It’s a house with a nice vibe and a charm,’’ Evan says.
The inner-city villa had been owned by one family, the Brodies, for nearly 100 years. Nisha and Evan bought it from a 90-year-old member of the family who had decided to sell after the earthquakes. It hadn’t been updated for a long time and the upper floor had been split into various independent living areas with little bathrooms and kitchens.
Fitting out the Eco Villa took the best part of two years.
‘‘We had to gut the whole thing,’’ Nisha says.
This would have been challenging enough had they just been updating a family home, but they had the added complications of converting it into a commercial building. Nisha had what she describes as a ‘‘crash course’’ with the structural and fire engineers. So, what was the biggest challenge?
‘‘The hardest thing is getting your consultants on board. At first, when you suggest things, they look at you like you’re a weird hippy and the stuff I was looking at doing isn’t even really that out there,’’ Nisha says.
She managed the project and researched sustainable options, while Evan continued his job in IT.
The couple were determined to recycle as much as possible. The kitchen is made entirely out of timber repurposed from other areas of the house; the headboards in the bedrooms are made from salvaged wood, including a lath feature wall; and even the coat hangers are original wooden ones from the home.
They also took a serious look at energy saving. All lightbulbs are LED. The house has been fully insulated and most windows are double-glazed. A greywater system reuses water from sinks and dishwashers and a commercial washing machine that runs on a one-minute cycle saves a huge volume of water.
These eco principles continue outside. Raised beds in the edible garden were built with bricks from a demolished chimney. As the bricks were removed, workers fed them down a chute on to an old mattress at the end, ensuring no breakages.
The deck has been constructed around an old lemon tree and the wrought-iron gate on the bike shed was originally used at the front of the house.
The Eco Villa opened to guests in January. It offers free bicycle hire, a fully equipped kitchen and outdoor baths, more common in rural accommodation.
Of all the eco features, the edible garden is the biggest hit with guests, Nisha says. It looks great, provides vegetables and herbs, and attracts people to the communal kitchen to cook.
The villa is an appealing home for Nisha, Evan and their nearly two-year-old daughter, as well as a family-friendly business Nisha can juggle with motherhood. But it’s also a great example of what can be achieved with will and determination.
‘‘We both wanted to infuse it with something that has meaning; we both wanted to contribute to something that makes the world a better place,’’ Nisha says.
A few streets away, another project has taken the power of growing food to a new level. Tucked away among construction sites and multistorey buildings on Peterborough St is an unexpected slice of rural life. Rows of rainbow chard, kale, spinach, lettuces, herbs and the delicate fronds of carrot tops jostle for space.
This is Cultivate, the brainchild of Bailey Perryman and Fiona Smith. They grow crops, while training young people in food production. It’s a ‘‘sort of farm school thing’’, says Fiona with a laugh. Bailey and Fiona met through the Vodafone Foundation, having both won World of Difference Awards in previous years. The programme grants money to those who want to make a difference to the lives of vulnerable young New Zealanders.
‘‘Bailey called me up and said ‘I hear you want to start a farm school’. And I said ‘that’s right’ and he said ‘I do, too’. So that’s what we did,’’ Fiona says.
With Bailey’s background in environmental management and community gardens, and Fiona’s work in mental health, they were ideally suited to come up with the Cultivate plan. In February 2015, the pair presented their idea to the Vodafone New Zealand Foundation. They were awarded $100,000 a year for three years to make it happen. In September that year, they identified a 3000sqm site where two houses had been demolished. The land was just hard, compacted rubble, overgrown with grass and littered with rubbish. They called in a friend with a digger and got to work.
As this is a transitional site, they could theoretically be asked to leave with 30 days’ notice, but Fiona is confident that is unlikely to happen. The pair also have a 1.7 hectare-site in Halswell and are trying to build a network of urban farms. Both sites are working farms and supply vegetables to city restaurants and cafes.
On the chilly autumn morning Avenues visits, people come and go, watering, planting and picking. A pot of water has been set to boil on the barbecue for morning tea and two dogs amble about, greeting visitors with wagging tails. It is a healthy mix of busy and friendly.
But the ultimate goal of Cultivate is to inspire troubled young people and provide them with meaningful work experience. At the most basic level, this teaches them about food and good nourishment, Fiona says. It is not uncommon for youths who have worked at Cultivate to then start digging up a patch of garden at home and growing things, drawing their family into the effort, too.
Fiona tells the story of one young woman who came to work at Cultivate and, seeing the rows of plants, said: ‘‘Nah, I don’t eat leafy green stuff.’’ A few months later, she was tucking into kale and chard with gusto.
The work also connects young people with the wider community, teaches them life skills, and gives them an understanding of the world of work. Many of the youngsters are referred through Youth Justice or other youth organisations, and counselling and other support is also factored into their time at Cultivate.
‘‘It’s counselling, but not in four walls, and you get to a deeper level of the real problems. We’re doing some real work here and getting some real outcomes,’’ Fiona says.
The farms follow the Small Plot Intensive Farming approach designed to maximise the productive potential of small plots. They also follow biodynamic and organic principles.
They have built the soil with wood chips from arborists, compost from Living Earth, and bokashi-treated waste. They create their own organic fertilisers from seaweed, fish and worm juice. Twice a week, a Cultivate worker cycles around Christchurch cafes and restaurants, collecting waste to compost.
Crops are rotated and natural pest-reduction techniques, such as beer traps and nets over plants, are used, as is common sense.
‘‘We also observe the land and see what is best to grow, so, for example, we grow a lot of leafy greens here; they do well. We can grow carrots, but they grow better out in Halswell,’’ Fiona says.
There’s a lot to think about and that’s one of the biggest challenges, she says.
‘‘It’s the logistical side, keeping all the plates spinning. There’s a consistent need to fundraise, apply for grants, networking, that kind of thing, and it takes time to break in land, grow, sell. I try to farm as much as possible.’’
Longer term, the aim is to build up sites and work with more young people. Fiona would love to have the use of a permanent farm site, with transitional youth housing and a cafe fed by the farm – all designed to help inspire youths, while taking care of the environment and paying for itself. They are lofty goals, but one gets the impression there’s enough determination at Cultivate to make it happen.
By contrast, Helen Rupp, aka the Rubbish Whisperer, has a tight focus with her environmental approach. For Helen, it’s all about rubbish and particularly the plastic waste that ends up in landfills or bobbing about in the ocean as part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of discarded plastic that is apparently now visible from space.
‘‘By 2050, they say there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean,’’ Helen says.
Globally, it is a massive problem, so what made her take it on?
A Canterbury University graduate with a degree in plant and microbial sciences, Helen has spent time living overseas and working on plant-related projects. It was a stint at botanic gardens at Kathmandu in Nepal in 2009 that got her thinking about rubbish.
‘‘In those countries that don’t have rubbish collections, the rubbish just builds up in the streets, in the rivers – it’s everywhere,’’ she says.
On returning to New Zealand, where our rubbish is conveniently whisked out of sight, Helen began thinking about making more sustainable choices when shopping.
Initially, she and husband Marc tried to buy products free from palm oil, aware of the myriad of associated environmental issues, from deforestation to the destruction of orang-utan habitats. However, it quickly became apparent that a mind-boggling number of products, from shampoo to chocolate, biscuits and potato chips, contain palm oil.
‘‘We found it was easier to just drop processed foods from our shopping,’’ Helen says.
Next, Helen cut out as much single-use plastic as she could from their household.
‘‘The more I looked, the more I realised you can replace pretty much everything with a sustainable alternative, so the first thing for us was dropping plastic shopping bags. Then I swapped our plastic toothbrushes for bamboo ones; then plastic straws for paper straws. These are small things and it really doesn’t make a change to your lifestyle.’’
But researching alternative products took time and Helen felt it would help people if they could find all sustainable options in one place. So, in 2013, she set up her website, therubbishwhisperer.co.nz, pulling together the most attractive alternatives she’d discovered.
‘‘Just because it’s good for the environment, it doesn’t have to be beige,’’ she says.
About the same time, Helen started talking to community groups about rubbish and how to reduce plastic waste in their own lives.
‘‘The trick is not to try and change everything at once. Find one thing you want to start with and focus on reducing that,’’ she says.
Reusable sandwich wraps and beeswax food wrap make great alternatives to cling film and work out cheaper in the long run. Or carry a reusable coffee cup for your morning caffeine hit – many cafes will even give a discount. And swap disposable razors for an old-fashioned one with replaceable stainless-steel blades.
Plastic straws are one of Helen’s bugbears.
‘‘Often you haven’t even used a product that is going to be around for hundreds of years.’’
Put like that, our throwaway nature does sound crazy and it’s part of the reason she’s about to launch a campaign, Plastic Straws are for Suckers, to urge New Zealanders to switch to paper straws.
The issue of rubbish seems overwhelming. Does it ever get her down?
‘‘It can be overwhelming, but that’s a negative way of thinking and it doesn’t achieve anything,’’ she says. ‘‘I believe one person really can make a difference.’’