The ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION’s (ATA) new sustainable living guide for renters is a good idea at the right time. How do I know this? Feedback from the professional evaluator monitoring Randwick City Council’s Living Smart course pilots says that his research has turned up a demand among course participants for more information on what renters and apartment dwellers can do to improve the energy and water efficiency of their residences.

Medium density dwellings, which account for much of the rental stock in the city and suburbs, have long been a bane of sustainability educators because making them more energy and water efficient, introducing composting systems for green waste and installing water tanks to store rainwater require sometimes difficult negotiation with the body corporate. Frequently, residents wanting to introduce these common sense and timely measures are thwarted.

Some apartments have done these things – I know Randwick Council’s sustainability educator has run lessons in composting for apartment block residents in Coogee. Some apartments have also turned over some of that unused lawn to vegetable growing. One, in Maroubra in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, installed a mandala garden (a type of circular garden accessed by narrow paths). In Manly, not far from where I live, I encountered an apartment block resident with what looks like their own small vegetable allotment.

Rainwater tanks are starting to appear too, like the 1930s apartment block down the road here and another in Ultimo, to mention just two. These supply water to the gardens, however the potential for connecting rainwater tanks to ground floor toilet cisterns is apparent, body corporates permitting.

These resource-conserving things are clearly starting to happen, especially among early adopter apartment dwellers. Some say that legislation to override body corporates, where energy and water efficiency is in question, is required to scale-up and speed-up the adoption of simply resource efficient technologies and design adaptations in apartment blocks.

That’s not happening yet, which makes the ATA’s little 16-page book useful for those in apartment blocks and for renters who which to reduce their resource consumption and environmental impact.

Much the same, much of value

What’s in the booklet? Many of the ideas that sustainability educators have recited these past years, time after time, it turns out… turning off switches, conserving water with shorter showers and so on. The book is set up as sections: lighting and heating and cooling are followed by tours through specific rooms — living room, kitchen, bathroom, laundry and outdoor areas. Reducing waste, transport and working with your landlord follow. It’s pretty comprehensive and quick to read.

While individuals doing all of these things will not turn our society around to sustainability by themselves — institutional, industry and government have to take their own initiatives and show determined leadership to do that — the little actions that the book describes empower individuals and families. Doing this is important and counters the complacency that comes when the challenges appear overwhelming and individuals helpless.

The positive message of the book and its value in bringing ideas and actions together in one publication clearly aimed at renters is commendable. And, given the technical expertise of the ATA, you can be assured that what they write is workable and practical.

I found a couple points, though, that seemed to ignore the realities of urban living.

Place of residence not always a simple choice

The first was the booklet’s advice to choose carefully where you live so that travel can be reduced. This is important not only to an individual’s time but to reducing the carbon cost of travel, especially if travel must be done by private automobile — and let’s face it, public transport does not service everywhere people work and a great amount of time can be spent in travel to and from work. I know people who travel up to two hours each way, each day, to and from work by public transport (that reduces to 40 minutes each way by car). They are not alone, and it eats into the time they have for non-work activities.

What I am saying is that it is not always possible to live near where you work, assuming that your work ties you to one workplace. There are the realities of urban geography that prevent this. Rents near the workplace can be too high. Industry aggregates into clusters, such as Sydney’s IT industry cluster at Ryde, the adventure sports retail cluster in the streets immediately west of Town Hall, the surf retail and manufacture cluster on the lower Northern Beaches and medical clusters around major hospitals. People also change jobs, some quite frequently, and finding new rental accommodation at each job change is expensive and time-consuming. Including a few paragraphs on the virtues of telecommuting — working electronically and online from home — would have been appropriate in the context of energy conservation.

With its focus on energy and water conservation, something I found missing in the book was any consideration of food choices. This is all the more curious as the University of Melbourne’s Eco-Innovation Lab report of 2007 (Sustainable and Secure Food Systems for Victoria) pointed out the importance of individual and family food choices in areas of energy and water consumption and waste production. Energy is used to produce, process, transport and market food and a lot of water is used in agriculture and food processing. Thus, in making choices about which food to buy, an individual or family inadvertently consumes differing proportions of these resources.

The A5 size book, which carries colour photographs and illustrations, is a useful summary of simple measures that renters can take to reduce their resource consumption. It is careful to identify which initiatives require landlord permission and points out that rebates are available to landlords for some of these. Printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based inks, renters and apartment owners can only gain from acquiring a copy.

Renters Guide to Sustainable Living; 2009; Alternative Technology Association, Melbourne. www.ata.org.au