China Daily Global Edition (USA)
LOW-CARBON HOUSEHOLDS
When small deeds go a long way in helping save the planet
When Luo Jing set out to retrofit her apartment last year, she had slightly different expectations besides the usual ones. Like everyone else, the 37 year-old psychotherapist wanted her place to have both the look and the comfort, but she hoped that with a relatively small budget (under 10,000 yuan or $1,520), she could also turn it into an energy-saving, emission-reduced home — one that reflects her way of life.
She believes that small deeds can help save the planet and she turned to Friends of Nature (FoN), one of the country’s prominent NGOs that promotes environmental protection, for help.
Since 2011, the organization has been running courses and workshops in Beijing on how best to save energy by making small changes in one’s home.
Luo had no background in interior design. But when FoN visited her retouched studio apartment for an assessment, the place had become another example of “mixing well one’s needs and the green guidelines”.
Luo had put up a fold-up bed, tables that fold and tuck into the wall, created a modest wall of plants, bamboo curtains, a watersaving system and done the easiest things one can do to reduce energy waste: replace regular light bulbs with LED ones and change old-fashioned sockets to ring sockets that can be timed.
She learned the principles — from lighting, water-saving, insulation to the better arrangement of space (a more efficiently deployed space means less demands of new construction) — at the low-carbon household FoN workshop last summer.
“I never knew that when turned off, a plugged TV could still use so much electricity,” Luo says. “I was simply shocked at the reading.”
“When I started to notice what these little things could amount to, I changed not only the living space but also started to adopt new habits,” she says.
She now turns off the lights whenever she leaves a room, unplugs appliances whenever she finishes using them and separates the wet from the dry almost automatically when dumping garbage.
“You start to find so many small things you can do to help,” says Luo. “It would be natural for anybody.”
Wang Yuan, the project manager with FoN says: “It’s not our goal to seek a specific cutting of emissions.
“What we hope to achieve through all these things is to encour- age and spread the word about doing the little things you can to save the environment.”
That said, families who refurbished their homes the energy-efficient way saw spectacular results.
Wang’s team found that each participating household saved between 30 and 50 percent of energy on average after retrofitting, and none of them had sacrificed their quality of life for it.
“We can only see part of the aftereffects like lower electricity and gas bills,” says Wang.
“That’s money saved. But there are also benefits one can’t gauge with a barometer.”
Beijing, a city which is perennially dry, becomes even more testing when heating comes on in the winter. Heating in the city mainly runs on gas now, but part of it still uses coal.
One low-carbon solution to the problem is turning to new materials that insulate better than what many old-fashioned apartments still rely on: changing aluminum window panes to broken bridge ones that keep the cold out, or overlaying insulation membranes that conserve the heat. Green plants in the house also help with humidifying and keeping indoor temperatures stable.
“These changes improve your life,” says Wang. “Low-carbon households let you live better while also conserving energy,” he says.
Smog, another worrying problem Beijing residents face, can also be reduced by low-carbon households.
Luo, for one, has learned to build 300 yuan air cleaners at her workshop.
Luo, as 17 others that joined the workshop this year, completed a draft design plan by herself and went through a mock thesis defense where she explained her plans from sockets to a water system to an expert panel.
FoN subsidizes each household with no more than 10,000 yuan.
Wu Jingshan, independent archi- tect and consultant who has been working with energy-conservation architecture since the early 2000s, says: “They may not be professional designers, but they know what they need better than any outsiders could ever know.
“Only when your own problems are solved can any green measures become really effective.
“Today, with the country’s households earning more, they’re concerned with the quality of their life,” says Wu.
Green, healthy and smart living spaces are where society is heading now. And energy-conservation is one requirement you can’t overlook,” he says.
Around 80 households in Beijing went through such facelifts by the end of 2015. Shanghai has recently started its own program.
During the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris, FoN showcased what the low-carbon household project had achieved in the past few years in China.
Wang, the project manager who shared the cases in Paris, says: “Similar things can be done in households around the world.
“We are all chipping in to see what everyone can do to shape our living space a little better.”
Kong Xia, another Beijing resident who renovated her apartment the low carbon way last year says the energy-saving tips are the most popular posts on her WeChat account right now.
“From a DIY your own air-cleaner to fermenting your own enzymes, these are things that people really want to read about,” Luo says.
“We are only ordinary people, there is nothing avant-garde about what we’ve done,” she adds.
“But just these simple things can bring about a palpable difference.”
I changed not only the living space but also started to adopt new habits.”
Luo Jing,
37-year-old psychotherapist