I’m a journalist living in Dublin and am currently deputy editor of Construct Ireland, a sustainable building and energy magazine. I’ve written for a range of other publications including the Irish Times and Sunday Tribune. I am available for freelance journalism and copywriting work. Click on ‘About’ to read more about me, or contact me at lenny.antonelli@gmail.com or at +353-86-1002540.

Published in the Irish Times, April 10 2009

Dublin will soon be home to a space for hackers to congregate and get creative, write LENNY ANTONELLI and JASON WALSH

IT’S NOT a word that’s used much in polite company – mention the term “hacker” and it conjures up nothing but negative images. But in today’s wired world of interconnected computer networks, e-mail, SMS messages, social networking and online banking, the stereotype of the computer hacker hasn’t kept up with the times.

At best, the outdated image from the 1983 film War Games comes to mind: intelligent kids getting into serious trouble while attempting mischievous pranks.

At worst, hackers are only a step away from terrorists, intent on destroying important computer networks and collecting enough personal data to make Google blush.

The reality is, as always, rather different. The personal computer as we know it today would not exist without the work of hackers. Mainframe computers share less DNA with a typical PC or Mac than a pocket calculator does and, famously, Apple Computers was founded by a pair of hackers, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in a Californian garage.

More recently, the Linux operating system currently revolutionising the business world is entirely the work of hackers. So much for tabloid visions of “cyber crime”.

Dublin will soon be home to a permanent space for computer hackers to congregate and get creative. Named Tóg (Irish for build), it will be Ireland’s contribution to the growing international movement of “hackerspaces”.

Sitting in the elegant, if incongruous, surroundings of Dublin’s Westin Hotel and explaining their plans, Tóg’s Jeff Rowe and Robert Fitzsimons emphasise that hacking is about curiosity: the desire to understand how technology works and the creative urge to build and modify gadgets. The only legal issue at stake here is the rather prosaic one of voiding warranties.

Fitzsimons is perfectly comfortable with the word hacker: “I’ll use ‘hacker’ and somebody else will use it, and there’ll be a completely different interpretation,” he says. “My hacking is out in the open. I have the 2600.ie domain – if anybody wants to find out who the hackers in Ireland are, my name is plastered on the site.”

Hacking, Fitzsimons says, is a form of self-education in a fast-moving world: “It’s about learning things about the electronic environment we live in.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the omnipresence of technology today, talk among the group does turn to political issues. Hackers tend to be opposed to technology for technology’s sake if it doesn’t bring anything to the table. E-voting, for example, has been roundly rejected by hackers as needlessly complex and fundamentally unsafe.

“The thing that gets me about e-voting is that these computers are essentially black boxes, but a vote isn’t a black box. Physical voting is a very transparent process,” says Rowe.

Technology consultant Colin Sweetman believes the term “hacker” needs to be approached with caution.

“The prehistory of even some Microsoft products shows they were developed by hackers working for fun in garages and then bought out,” he says.

“A lot of the actual malicious ‘hacking’ is done by what are called ‘script kiddies’ messing around with software they didn’t write and don’t really understand.”

Sweetman also poses an interesting question about the source of malicious computer viruses and scams: “Nobody knows how many ‘black-hat’ hackers in former Soviet states and in China are actually, at least tacitly, supported by their governments,” he says.

Scams, industrial espionage and schemes for geopolitical domination are a world away from the reality of computer hacking as practised in Ireland.

Tóg’s Rowe, who spends his days researching devices for the visually impaired at Dublin City University, is a walking, talking example of the kind of hacker who engages in self-motivated learning and playing. Rowe’s work is important, interesting, technical and difficult. His play may be less important, but it shares all of the other characteristics: he is currently designing an exact replica of a 1980s arcade machine to play old video games.

“I want it to look and feel authentic,” he says. “There’s no point in just having a desktop unit. Half of the fun is two people standing up against the unit.”

An avid cyclist, Fitzsimons, a computer programmer by profession, is working on gadgets for his bike: “Because I cycle and there’s potholes everywhere, I’m interested in putting sensors on my bike so you can measure the road surface and how closely cars overtake you,”

Fitzsimons and Rowe are among 16 technology enthusiasts, many of them supporters of 2600 magazine, the technology underground’s premier periodical, planning to open the Tóg hackerspace in Dublin – a home for hackers to work on projects, collaborate and socialise.

Similar spaces have sprung up across Europe and the US in recent years. For Fitzsimons, Rowe and the rest of the group, it was a trip to the 25th congress of Germany’s Chaos Computer Club hacker group that crystallised the idea. “It really gave us the final push,” says Rowe “We decided to get a group and start planning and get it in motion.”

Fitzsimons hopes the space will be conducive to technological creativity and collaboration, while also being a place for hackers to relax: “I’d like to see an area with couches and TVs and X-boxes or whatever, and you wouldn’t necessarily have computers in there, and then you’d have another room with computers; people [will] have somewhere to go and get away from computers.”

Fitzsimons would also like to have woodwork and kitchen facilities in the space, allowing members to engage in other creative, hands-on activities unrelated to computers.

“Some of us like cooking and some of the hackerspaces even have a Sunday dinner,” says Fitzsimons.

“I hope it wouldn’t be the case where people would just hang out and play computer games and not actually participate in the idea of making something or doing something slightly creative with their time and space.”

In terms of technological projects, Rowe says it will be a learning curve for everyone. “Maybe just one or two people know how to do complex projects, [so] it’ll start off with making an LED display that flashes different lights and you can program different messages, and then it’ll slowly build up and up.”

For now, the group will have to settle for “booting up” in a single room. With 16 members paying €50 a month towards rent, the group is hoping to find a suitable space in central Dublin by May.

Once the space is up and running, the group will hold weekly public meetings for prospective members. The group is confident it will attract new members quickly – and enough income to start looking for larger premises.

At a time when communication is increasingly moving online, it is ironic that a group of technology enthusiasts are so anxious to find a physical space in which to communicate, but Tóg has a rationale: “The highest bandwidth [mode of communication] is obviously face-to-face,” says Rowe.

“It’s all about the community. It’s the community that drives all these sorts of things. We’d be nothing if it was just a space and there was no community, and no one knew each other in the space.”

Fitzsimons agrees: “It’s about the community, and about that community building and making and creating. If that involves technology, brilliant. If it doesn’t, brilliant.”

If the information economy means anything at all, it requires motivated, intelligent and creative players – just what Tóg and the hackerspaces movement are intent on creating.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

Published in Construct Ireland, November 2008

Designing sustainable buildings doesn’t always mean hi-tech solutions. From green roofs to living walls to constructed wetlands, sometimes it’s just a matter of embracing natural solutions. Lenny Antonelli investigates the emerging technologies and designs that use nature to improve the performance of buildings.

When Erik van Lennep says he wants buildings to be greener, he means it literally. “Our goal is to maximise green roof coverage in Dublin,” he says. That goal could soon be within sight, as Dublin City Council takes the first steps towards embracing green roofs.

Van Lennep, the founder of sustainability consultancy Tepui, has prepared guidelines on the types, functions and advantages of green roofs for Dublin City Council’s planners. His guidelines also recommend the introduction of a green roofs policy for the city, and the installation of green roofs on existing council buildings. “At the moment we’re just giving advice to our planning department. It’s up to them to request green roofs,” says Mairead Stack, Dublin City Council’s biodiversity officer, who along with van Lennep has been at the forefront of pushing green roofs in the city. “We’ll be strongly trying to incorporate a green roofs policy into the council’s next development plan,” she says.

Such a policy could request developers to include green roofs in certain cases. The Greater London Authority’s latest development plan demands major developments to “incorporate living roofs and walls where feasible.” In Basel, Switzerland, all new and renovated flat-roofed buildings must be greened to a depth of at least 10cm, while in the Austrian city of Linz all new flat-roofed buildings over 100m2 must include green roofs.

Green roofs aren’t a new technology. Newgrange is the earliest surviving Irish example, while in northern Scandinavia sod roofs and walls, some still surviving, have been around for centuries. The development of modern green roofs began in 1960s Germany, and it is estimated that ten per cent of the country’s flat roofs have since been greened.

There are three basic types of green roof. The extensive variety reaches a depth of 200mm, is light and easy to maintain, and features moss, sedum and grass species. Intensive green roofs can be up to 500mm deep, and the roof must often be designed specifically to support this heavier load. Regular maintenance is needed, but they can support all types of trees and shrubs, and act as true rooftop gardens. Semi-intensive green roofs sit in between; they require moderate structural support, and are limited to shrubs, perennials and grasses. German company Bauder has been supplying both extensive and intensive green roof systems to the Irish market for many years, including landmark eco buildings featured in previous editions of Construct Ireland such as Navan Credit Union, Daintree, and Mater Orchard, to name but a few.

he basic components of most green roofs are the same: a frame to hold the soil in place (often made of timber), a waterproof membrane, root barrier layer, drainage zone, growing substrate, and vegetation.

Some modern examples of green roofs are striking. The Acros building in Japan’s Fukuoka city features a series of terraced green roofs that reach 60 metres in height, merging seamlessly with an adjacent park at ground level, while Ford’s River Rouge factory complex in Michigan boasts ten acres of ‘living’ roof – the world’s largest – designed by noted green architect William McDonough.

But green roofs are more than an architectural statement designed to green the grey urban environment. They offer impressive practical benefits too, such as drastically reduced rainwater runoff, increased urban biodiversity and impressive insulation performance. They also provide green space in dense urban areas, and help to cool local temperatures. “They tick all the boxes,” Mairead Stack says.

As global temperatures rise, green roofs can play a key role in mitigating the effects of climate change in urban areas, where artificial surfaces absorb heat and buildings dominate the skyline, raising local temperatures above those in the surrounding countryside (the urban heat island effect). By evaporating water and absorbing less heat, green roofs reduce local temperatures. The surface temperature of Chicago city hall’s green roof can be as much as 44oc cooler than conventional roofs nearby, while in Toronto researchers concluded that if all possible roof space in the city were greened, it would lead to a 0.5 – 2.0oc reduction in city temperatures.

Greening a roof can affect temperatures within buildings too: a green roof can reduce summer temperatures underneath the roof membrane by 15oc and raise winter temperatures by 2.5oc, according to a study conducted at the University of Nottingham.

From an engineer’s perspective, the ability of green roofs to reduce rainwater runoff is impressive: research carried out in the temperate Pennsylvania climate concluded that an extensive green roof can reduce runoff by up to 100 per cent in summer and 30 per cent in winter.

Green roofs can also neutralise acid rain and sequester carbon. “We’ve tested a typical sedum roof, and the amount of carbon sequestered is small,” Brad Rowe, associate professor of horticulture at Michigan State University told Construct Ireland. “It’s comparable to desert scrub. But if you have something deeper it’ll have more biomass, and it’ll sequester much more. Even with a sedum mat though, it’s more than is sequestered on a typical roof.”

With the principles of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) – including the demand that runoff in new developments should not exceed that of a typical greenfield site – enshrined in the development plans of every local authority in the greater Dublin area, green roofs could soon become a common facet of new developments in the city. “The most practical way of meeting the requirements of SuDS in a high density area is to use a green roof,” says Don McEntee, senior engineer with Dublin city council, though he says that permeable paving is another viable option.

McEntee says that green roofs can have a positive effect on local water quality too. In Dublin, roof drainage systems carry water directly into the sewage network. When the sewers fill during heavy rainfall, diluted raw sewage flows into the Liffey. Because green roofs absorb so much rainfall, they ease pressure on sewage systems and reduce overflow into local rivers.

Intuitively, green roofs can boost biodiversity in urban areas. Environmental consultant Dusty Gedge says that his interest in green roofs developed from his work on bird conservation in London. “I was working on the conservation of the black redstart, and I thought, why don’t they just put the habitat on the roof?” says Gedge, who estimates that between existing green roofs and planned future ones, there will soon be 700,000 square metres of green roof in London.

With a background in biodiversity, Gedge isn’t a fan of homogenous sedum mats. “The construction industry is very mechanistic. It likes everything to be the same, whether it’s paving or bricks…a green roof is essentially a landscape. If you’re building a green roof near the Burren, the Burren should essentially be the green roof at land level.”

Mairead Stack says that Dublin City Council is also examining the concept of biodiverse roofs, on which a material such as gravel or concrete is laid at varying heights to create a diverse topography that replicates brownfield sites. “Brownfield sites have one of the highest biodiversities. You get a whole lot of very rare plant and insect species,” she says.

Green roofs are compatible with other sustainable rooftop technologies, such as solar thermal arrays and rainwater harvesting systems, and green roofs can even improve the performance of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems: by reducing localised temperatures they prevent PV panels from overheating, an often-cited reason for inefficiencies in PV technology.

Clearly green roofs boast an impressive list of benefits, but are they cost effective? While additional materials and labour can add up to 30 per cent to the cost compared to a conventional roof, this can be offset by savings from reduced energy consumption and roof maintenance. By sheltering roof materials from the weather, green roofs can double or even treble their lifespan, according to research from Penn State University.

Dusty Gedge believes that attitudes towards green roofs are changing: “Six years ago nobody talked about climate change, and now people are interested in the urban heat island effect, energy performance, storm water attenuation and growing food on green roofs,” he says.

While green roofs are growing in popularity, their vertical equivalent has some catching up to do. Perhaps the most famous green walls are those gracing Parisian streetscapes, designed by French botanist Patrick Blanc. In Paris, subsidies are available for residents to install green walls on building facades. The city authorities even look after maintenance. “They don’t have any more places to green on the ground, so they’re going up the walls,” van Lennep says.

Outdoors, there are two types of green wall. Common green facades are facilitated with simple trellising. In other cases, vegetation is rooted in soil or an inorganic growing medium, often in pre-vegetated panels that are installed over the building structure. “These are highly engineered systems,” van Lennep says.

Like green roofs, green walls offer practical benefits: they create a dead air space that provides thermal insulation, cut down daily temperature fluctuations at the wall surface by up to 30oc, and reduce wind chill by up to 75 per cent (with a knock-on reduction in heating demand of up to 25 per cent). They also remove pollutants from the air, help to counter the urban heat island effect and sequester carbon.

It’s not just outdoors that you find green walls though. Van Lennep says that ‘active’ green walls can help to improve indoor air quality by removing pollutants. “They’re hooked up to an air handling system. Fans circulate air around the building and push it through the padded roots, and that scrubs the air,” he says.
Green roofs and walls are just one way in which biology and engineering combine to make buildings more sustainable. Constructed wetlands are another. Essentially artificial marshes, constructed wetlands are a low-energy method of treating wastewater, sewage, or effluent from industry or agriculture.

Vegetation in the wetland acts as a substrate on which micro-organisms grow, breaking down organic matter. Combined with natural chemical processes, this removes 90 per cent of pollutants from the water. The plants themselves remove seven to ten per cent of pollutants, and absorb nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. As different aquatic plants take up nutrients and heavy metals at different rates, a constructed wetland is designed specially for the type of wastewaster it’s treating.

There are two basic types: subsurface flow wetlands, where effluent flows through a gravel or sand medium in which wetland plants are rooted, and surface flow wetlands, in which effluent moves above the soil in a planted marsh or swamp. Living machines, a variation of constructed wetlands, are highly engineered systems in which wastewater is remediated as it is pumped through a series of tanks, each a unique microhabitat designed to treat specific elements of the wastewater stream. In temperate climates, living machines are often kept in greenhouses to maintain the temperatures needed to stimulate biological activity.

Dublin’s only constructed wetland in the Tolka Valley Park treats water from the heavily polluted Finglaswood stream before it enters the Tolka river. To ensure the system is effective throughout the year, the wetland is planted with a selection of species that exhibit a variety growing seasons.  “We’re trying to get three more (constructed wetlands) up and running in Dublin,” McEntee says.

Dublin City Council is looking at innovative wetland projects pioneered by other local authorities. Thirteen farms around the village of Dunhill in County Waterford have developed wetlands, and water quality in a local river has dramatically improved. “Ten years ago the Anne river was totally polluted. Now sea trout are swimming back up,” McEntee says.

The village of Glaslough in Monaghan has taken things further, treating its sewage effluent with a wetland system. Wastewater flows through four ponds sequentially before being monitored in a fifth pond. “It does a better job than a conventional wastewater treatment because it will remove things like hormones that conventional treatment can’t. You get a cleaner effluent from a wetland than from wastewater treatment,” McEntee says.

With leaking septic tanks being partly responsible for widespread pollution in Irish waterways, the potential for constructed wetlands is obvious, particularly in rural areas where the cost of bringing conventional sewage treatment is often prohibitive. So why are there so few?

“There’s total scepticism around it,” McEntee says. “The only way to get over that is to champion a project and prove that it does work. Take Glaslough for example, it had 40 per cent of the construction cost of a conventional treatment plant, and has 5 to 10 per cent of the running costs. It needs virtually no power either, so from a carbon footprint point of view, it’s very good.”

One worry for hydrologists is that contaminated water can leak through the clay lining of a constructed wetland. McEntee doesn’t see this as a problem. He says that as organic material settles out in a wetland, it forms a natural seal in the pores of the clay lining that prevents contaminated water seeping out.

McEntee acknowledges that constructed wetlands aren’t flawless though. “The biggest downside is the amount of land required,” he says. Constructed wetlands generally require more land than conventional systems, though they can be developed on most land types and so needn’t necessarily compete with agriculture for fertile land. Nonetheless, the extra space requirements of constructed wetlands can be justified on the basis that they can provide amenity value. Many developers include water features instead of green spaces for housing schemes on the basis that it attracts buyers. A well-designed constructed wetlands can fulfil this function whilst also reducing environmental impacts and providing a home for flora and fauna to thrive.

Constructed wetlands are an example of the emerging discipline of ecological engineering. But embracing living technologies doesn’t necessarily require such complex systems; sometimes it’s just a matter of planting trees in the right place. In May, Construct Ireland profiled new green-roofed local authority offices in Ardee, County Louth. The building’s designers also planted trees between the south-facing glazed area of the building and an open park, creating a natural brise soleil that prevents glare and overheating in the summer months.

Smart planting can make an impressive difference to building performance. Planting deciduous trees on the south side of a building provides shading during the summer and allows maximum solar gain in winter. On the north side, evergreen trees will deflect cold winter winds.  Ireland’s mild climate supports an extensive array of plants species, with a wide range of seasonalities, enabling architects and designers to create tailored landscapes and improve the performance of a building based on local conditions.

Published in the Sunday Tribune, March 16 2008

The property market might be slowing, but the self-buildmarket remains steady. Lenny Antonelli spoke to one company satisfying self-builders’ desire for bespoke, environmentally friendly homes

THE housing market might be slowing, but people’s desire to build their dream home doesn’t seem to be. “We haven’t experienced the same kind of slowdown as the mainstream market, ” says John Watson of GriffnerHaus, which has been building bespoke timberframe homes in Ireland for the past five years. Watson believes the downturn has shifted power to buyers, who are starting to demand unique designs and higher quality, as well as energy efficiency and eco-friendly features.

Brian Corry of Self Build Ireland believes there has been a growth in demand for green features in particular. “It’s become very much mainstream, and it’s being driven by self-builders. A lot of self-builders are environmentally conscious.”

GriffnerHaus has been at the forefront of the growth in green building. Its homes have achieved a Building Energy Rating (BER) of A, but its commitment goes further than this. “Virtually all of the materials used for our walls and roofing are recycled or recyclable.

All of our timber comes from certified, managed forests. For every tree we use, another is planted, ” Watson says. More than 70% of its houses incorporate renewable energy.

GriffnerHaus arrived in Ireland in 2003 under the guise of Griffner Coilte, a partnership with the state forestry company. GriffnerHaus bought out Coilte’s stake last year.

The company has built close to 100 houses in the past five years, but hasn’t limited itself to the domestic market . . . key projects have included a visitor centre at Lough Key in Roscommon and a number of creche facilities.

The company’s biggest advantage is that it builds off-site, according to Watson. “It means we can monitor every stage of the build process, and when we ship to site we can build to quality. That’s what differentiates us.” With most work done in a factory, once on site it can have a house watertight and lockable within six days.

Off-site construction was a big factor in persuading architect Paul Leech to choose GriffnerHaus for a recent project in Co Meath. Leech associates traditional on-site building with a “lack of control of quality, cost and time. There’s better control of these off-site. You can achieve precision building.”

The Meath ‘teahouse’, as Leech likes to call it, is a bespoke, lowenergy, timber-framed house, influenced by Japanese design. “The inspiration is a Japanese tea house.

Our intention was to keep the building extremely simple. Our mantra is to use less of everything, more efficiently. There’s an awful lot of talk of bolt-ons for sustainability resasons, but you can achieve two thirds of the sustainability agenda without any bolt-ons.”

Watson says that GriffnerHaus buildings can typically achieve a BER of A before any renewable energy technologies are added.

Leech is certain the ‘teahouse’ will achieve an A rating.

Perched along the edge of a pond, the house is designed so sunlight follows its inhabitants throughout the day. Morning sunshine falls onto the bedrooms. In the afternoon and evening, most light hits the sitting room, while last to catch the evening sun are a spare bedroom that doubles as a living room, and a study. The very last sun on summer evenings, however, falls on an outdoor terrace that sits on stilts over the pond.

A bespoke, environmentally friendly house in such a wonderful setting sounds like a dream . . . but how realistic is it? Watson stresses that “while our prices can appear higher, we’re quoting for a house that will be ready to be lived in. We quote right down to the number of sockets, the tiling, the flooring. It’s an all-inclusive and fixed price.” He says that anyone thinking of building with GriffnerHaus would need to budget around 185 per square foot. Compared with a block-built house with the same standard of insulation and energy efficiency, he believes its price is “extremely competitive”.

What have planners’ attitudes been towards Griffnerhaus methods? “Initially planners were wary of timber frames, but they can’t ignore the energy efficiency of our buildings. Thankfully though, between government initiatives and people’s general savvy, there’s definitely been an increase in knowledge about environmental building issues. I still think we’re behind the rest of Europe though.

We’ve still got some way to catch up.

But you can either embrace it or get dragged along by it.”

Published in Sustainability magazine, Spring 2007

Climate change’s fastest growing contributor requires urgent action, and is being fueled by the banality of modern living, writes Lenny Antonelli

Last October, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke announced that he was considering “refusing to tour on environmental grounds”. If he’s as serious about environmental issues as he appears to be, his band should stop flying to their gigs immediately.

According to the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, 35,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years to offset the carbon emissions generated by the band’s Hail to the Thief tour. Although these figures took into consideration the monumental volume of emissions generated by fans traveling to the gigs, the carbon footprint of simply flying the five members of the band to the various venues was huge. It amounted to 54 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or roughly the same level of emissions as would result from heating an average Irish home for around seven to ten years.
Flying is the fastest growing contributor to climate change. Currently, aviation accounts for about three per cent of global emissions, which might not seem alarming. But this figure is set to rise quickly. Since 1960, air passenger traffic has grown at almost nine per cent annually. It is difficult to predict future trends, but in its milestone report on aviation and climate change in 1999, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used a model which predicted the burning of aircraft fuel (another way of looking at the growth in air traffic, while taking into account likely increases in fuel efficiency) to be 6.6 times greater in 2050 than it was in 1990.
However, this doesn’t tell the full story. Because it is released high in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide emitted from aircraft, unlike that released from other sources, has a ‘radiative forcing ratio’ of around 2.7, meaning that the global warming effect of aircraft is about 2.7 times greater than that of its carbon dioxide alone. Take this into account along with the likely future growth of the industry, and the gravity of the problem quickly becomes clear.
Current research suggests that aviation emissions alone will exceed EU carbon targets by 2050. Essentially, this means that if air traffic continues to grow as projected and we still intend to meet our emissions targets, all other sectors will be forced to be become totally carbon neutral in order to accommodate planes. Even by 2030, aviation would exceed half of our allowed carbon emissions. What’s perhaps more frightening is that these figures take into consideration likely improvements in fuel efficiency and engine design.
As for the possibilities of a new, clean aviation fuel, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change summed up the scientific consensus: “It appears unlikely that any alternative to kerosene as an aviation fuel will be in widespread use by 2030.” So what is the significance of this? Well, if unabated, climate change is predicated to shrink global economies by between five and twenty per cent. It could cause up to 200 million people to become refugees through drought or flooding, and lead to a 30 per cent decline in annual water availability in sub Saharan Africa. Tens of millions more people would be exposed to tropical diseases. Between 20 and 300 million people would be forced to move due to flooding, with an estimated 145 to 220 million at risk of falling below the $2 per day poverty line. Coral reefs could disappear completely within 100 years, while a 3C temperature rise, as forecast in the latest IPCC report, would threaten between 20 and 50 per cent of species with extinction.
Clearly, urgent action is needed, and due to the rapid rate of the industry’s growth, aviation should be near the top of the list of industries we target. So can we continue to fly? The Tyndall Centre concludes that aviation must be halted at current levels, or even perhaps reduced, if the EU is to meet its emissions targets. According to the latest research, however, the EU’s targets are not far-reaching enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. If we are lucky, we may still be able to travel by air very infrequently, but the days of weekend trips to Prague, Venice and Rome must surely be drawing to an end. It is hard to justify shopping trips to New York, weekend breaks in European cities, or domestic flying, when the emissions from the planes we fly in are the fastest growing contributor to the cause of drought in Ethiopia and serious flooding in Bangladesh.
Currently, there are no national or international plans to reverse, stop or even manage the growth in aviation. Rather, it is being encouraged. The UK is set to add the equivalent capacity of an additional Heathrow airport to its aviation infrastructure every five years as it undergoes a major airport expansion program. Here in Ireland, minister for transport Martin Cullen said last year that, in regards to aviation, his department had an “unambiguous mandate for growth”. And this is despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluding that “if (the) infrastructure was not available, the growth in traffic…would not materialise”.
If we were to accept Ben Franklin’s definition of insanity as doing something over and over again and expecting a different result, surely this would qualify. While some might suggest that the rapid growth in air tourism is a shining example of the wonderful freedoms that living in a modern, developed and wealthy industrialised economy offers; there is also validity in the argument that much of this growth is fueled by a sense of claustrophobia, discontent and boredom that living in such a society causes.
What awaits people when they enter the working world is essentially a life of concrete suburban banality: living in identikit, featureless housing estates, driving to and from jobs that are highly unsatisfying for most, and spending little or no time connecting with our community, nature, or the world around us – essentially the very things that allow us to feel free and human without needing to travel halfway around the world and sit on a beach. Paradoxically, here in western countries it is often those who have flown to far flung places who are best at empathising with and fighting for the rights of the those living in extreme poverty on other continents – the people most likely to suffer the effects of flying and climate change.
A redefinition of our values is needed; we can make protecting the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet more important to us than an impulsive and ultimately destructive urge to “escape”.
Perhaps, when it comes down to it, a big part of the solution to halting the growth in aviation emissions won’t be new fuels, better engine efficiency or alternative forms of transport, but the adoption of a seemingly simpler, but possibly far more personally challenging strategy. It was best summed up by author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot in a discussion of the potential for space tourism. His logic applies equally to the era of cheap flights: “Doubtless space tourism agencies will seek to make us feel inadequate and dull if we choose to stay behind. They will broker the dissatisfaction that holiday companies trade in today when trying to persuade people to visit India or the United States. We will go, as we go on inter-continental journeys, in the hope of finding something that we have never defined in the course of a quest we have never examined. And, as ever, the thing we are looking for will be inside us all along.”

Published in Sustainability magazine, Spring 2007

The minister for the environment has been busy praising his government’s record on residential and commercial waste management in light of a new EPA report, but a whole new approach is necessary if we are serious about conserving our most precious resources, writes Lenny Antonelli

Anyone who has been listening to environment minister Dick Roche lately might have gotten the impression that Ireland had suddenly become a champion of sustainable waste management. Addressing the Recycling Consultative Forum at Dublin Castle back in January, the minister described the advances made in waste management in Ireland over the past eight years as “remarkable”. He emphasised his “delight” at Ireland meeting its EU recycling target for 2013 eight years ahead of schedule, and claimed that there was “evidence that we are breaking the link between economic growth and waste generation”. Speaking last October, he claimed that Ireland was on its way to becoming a “leading European recycling nation”, and with regards to waste management, he previously said that Ireland has been “phenomenally successful”. Lavishly praising your own record in office has long been a pastime of many politicians. But can the minister back-up his celebratory mood?
Many of the facts and figures that prompted his glee were contained in the Environmental Protection Agency’s national waste report for 2005, released in January. And while on the surface it shows some positive trends, it ultimately paints a picture of a nation that’s management of waste remains totally unsustainable.
First, and briefly, the good news: Ireland has indeed already met the 2013 recycling target set by the EU, and has exceeded the specific target set for the recycling of packaging materials. Rates of recycling continue to increase nationwide, while the number of bring banks and recycling centres also continues to grow, and the collection of kerbside dry recyclables almost doubled in 2005.
But while some of the specific trends may be positive, the bigger picture is somewhat more grim. The overall rate of recycling for the residential and commercial sector remains poor. Ireland may have already hit its 2013 recycling target, but that goal in itself is decidedly unambitious at 35 per cent. Disappointingly, less than a quarter of household waste is recycled. Almost two million tonnes of commercial and residential waste still ends up in landfill every year, while less than 20 per cent of plastics and 10 per cent of organic (compostable) waste is recycled.
What’s perhaps most alarming is what we’re doing with most of the material collected for recycling: shipping it abroad. Over 95 per cent of our paper and cardboard is exported since the closure of the Smurfit paper mill. The figures are similar for glass, while over three quarters of plastic and textiles are also shipped abroad. In fact, of all of our major categories of municipal waste, there is only one – wood – of which the majority is recycled here in Ireland, and that comprises just a small fraction of our residential and commercial waste stream.
Clearly, there is little point in developing systems designed to manage waste sustainably if they are contributing to the unsustainable consumption of fossil fuels and the production of unnecessary greenhouse gases. Almost half a million tonnes of waste was exported for recycling in 2005, a 25 per cent increase on the previous year. And while over half of this was only sent as far as western European countries, the EPA conceedes that a “certain proportion of Irish waste exported to EU countries is shipped onwards within and outside of the EU”.
Most worryingly, over 100,000 tonnes was sent as far Asia, and over a third of this went to China, a country where foreign recyclables are often dealt with by poorly paid migrant workers in rudimentary facilities or backstreet workshops with little environmental or labour standards.
Other figures also undermine the minister’s boasting. Almost three quarters of household and commercial waste is biodegradable, yet over half of this is landfilled. Under the EU’s landfill directive, Ireland was supposed to reduce the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill to 75 per cent of the 1995 figure by last year, but disappointingly opted for a four-year postponement of the target. It is still likely to be missed.
So then, to which category does Ireland belong – modern, sophisticated, western European nation that has fully embraced recycling, or one that is still lagging far behind?
According to Dr Niamh Clune, the director of Zero Waste Alliance Ireland, we’re not doing nearly as well as we could be. “We’re doing very well in some ways. We haven’t be doing it as long, and we have caught up quickly. But I believe it is possible to recycle 90 per cent of everything defined as waste. We’re not doing nearly as much as we could.” Zero waste is a philosophy that emphasises reducing and reusing waste as much as possible at all stages of our society and economy, and then using what waste we do produce as a resource to produce new goods. Dr Clune has been a champion of resource recovery parks in Ireland – collections of small business in a single location involved in reusing, recycling and composting waste, which can then be made into new products and sold. “Everything is brought to one place”, Niamh explains, “where it can be turned into value added products. It creates new business and new innovations, and profits can be used to fund community projects.” While acknowledging that we’ve made some progress in recent years, Dr Clune says that we’re just “bringing in methods from Europe, where they’ve been making mistakes for years. We have a chance to do something innovative and new here.” She believes that what she sees as the unique sense of community in Ireland can foster real local innovations in recycling.
Dr Clune certainly intends to lead by example. She is currently waiting to hear if Galway County Council will give her the go-ahead for the development of a resource recovery park in her home town of Gort, Co Galway. If the project get approved, it will be the first facility of its kind in Europe.
What’s needed, according to Niamh, is a “paradigm shift in thinking”, from seeing waste as just an unwanted byproduct to a potential resource. “I believe that waste is the new gold mine of the 21st century”, she says. “It’s a no-brainer to make…products out of our resources, it’s just about having a holistic, whole-systems approach.” Having conducted two feasibility studies in Galway, Dr Clune has concluded that resource recovery parks could potentially save businesses 70 per cent of their refuse charges. She also claims to have identified six potential products that could be developed from common items found in Gort’s waste. “It doesn’t make economic sense” she says, referring to traditional methods of waste management.
It is clear that innovation and new ideas are urgently needed. As long as our reasons for recycling are simply to rid ourselves of a growing mountain of waste on a small island, avoid the awkward task of where to locate landfills, and maintain a clean image, we will continue to be satisfied with a waste management system that recycles a moderate amount of waste, sending most of it abroad.
However, if we are serious about conserving our most precious resources – the petrochemicals that make our plastics, the trees that make our paper and cardboard, the metals that make our tins and cans – we must adapt a whole new approach, one that firstly, vastly reduces the amount of waste we create (something that will be discussed in further detail in future issues of Sustainability) and then reuses and recycles almost all of the rest. New thinking, such as resource recovery parks, must be a part of that, as must more traditional solutions, such as shifting our mindset to see many of the common ‘waste’ items in our homes as what they are: minute packages of vastly depleting resources, rather than throwaway items of infinite supply.
On a national and local scale, there are many good ideas to inspire us. In Denmark, 98 per cent of bottles are refillable, and 98 per cent of these are returned by customers. In Canada and other countries, deposit refund schemes enable people to return such bottles and be paid a small fee for each one. In its waste policy, the Green Party promises to provide financial aid for community-run, not-for-profit recycling initiatives, to establish a national resource exchange network – a central database that would allow people to advertise available materials and suggest possible uses – and to provide a home composter to every home that can take one. Government incentives and initiative can develop resource recovery parks and a develop the recycling enterprise in Ireland to prevent recyclables from being needlessly transported abroad.
While Minister Roche may applaud our progress, we must acknowledge that what we have achieved and the future milestones we hope to reach are insufficient if we are serious about making a contribution to conserving our rapidly depleting natural resources. His party’s slogan at the last election has been much debased in the media, but considering the importance of this issue, doing so again seems an appropriate way to depict his government’s record on waste management and the challenges that face us if we are to master it in a truly sustainable way: A little done, a lot, lot more to do.

Published in Sin, 2005.

Waiting for Robert Fisk is rather unnerving. You expect him to arrive looking forlorn, with a furrowed brow and an air of sobriety that you might think comes with living in the most tragic place on earth for almost 30 years. But the Bob Fisk you expect never shows up.

Instead, a genial and pleasant Englishmen bumbles into the room apologetically, putting everyone at ease. He refuses to take the designated seat behind the front table at a makeshift mini-press conference in the Irish Centre for Human Rights, declaring it to be foreign territory for a journalist, and opts instead to sit with the assembled reporters.

Fisk, middle east correspondent for the Indpendent of London, a paper which has wrestled the crown of the great British liberal newspaper from the Guardian, is in the middle of a worldwide tour to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, which charts his experience reporting on every major event in the region over the last thirty years. In that time, he has reported from both Gulf wars, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the conflict in Algeria, the Lebaneese civil war, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times. He is scheduled to return to Baghdad in December
In truth, Fisk is an enigma. An outspoken opponent of American and British foreign policy, he has spent more than half of his lifetime reporting on some of the bloodiest affairs in modern history, and has essentially done so alone, without wife or children to soften the effects of the tragedies he has witnessed. And yet remarkably, he is still able to smile and joke freely, in spite of the grizzly nature of some of his discourse.
“I go to a mortuary every trip to Baghdad, and I stand there all morning counting the corpses in. The last Monday I was there, four weeks ago, there was a woman with her hands tied behind her back shot three times in the head, and a baby that had been shot in the face. Others are clearly blown up by suicide bombers, in which case they come in in bits, and they try to fit the bits together.”
Such sights and comments come naturally to Fisk, who reckons that the estimate of 100,000 Iraqi dead since the war began “may be conservative”. But perhaps it is the ability to laugh in the face of human tragedy that molds the kind of character needed for Fisk’s profession.
He firmly believes that the western public should also be witness to the kind of devastation that he has spent his life reporting on. He recalls traveling on the Baghdad to Basra road in 1991, following two days of sustained US bombing. “We came across these large numbers of Iraqi soldiers who had been blown to bits, and the dogs had arrived – it was lunchtime you see. And they were tearing bits of bodies off and racing off across the desert with arms and legs to eat.”
An ITV television crew was with Fisk at the time, and began filming the scene. “Why are you wasting your time, they’ll never show this?” Fisk questioned. “And I remember thinking they ought to show it – this what the war is about, this is what happens, every time. If you go and see Saving Private Ryan, you can see it. But when it’s real you’re not allowed to. They clean up the war.”
Of course, Fisk’s stoicism has not endeared him to all. His persistent and scathing attacks on US and British foreign policy have led many to question the veracity of his reporting. Fisk is clear in his thoughts on the role of the journalist. “If you go down into Galway and there’s been a bomb, and lets hope there never is, and there are people all over the road dead, you get angry about it, furious about it.” “Well I’m allowed to get angry too. And I’m allowed to name the people who did it if I think I can find out. I was just down the road when this guy blew up in Jerusalem and killed lots of Israeli kids. There was a child with his eyes blown out. Do you think I’m going to give equal time to Hamas? No, I write stories about the victims.”
Later that evening, Fisk, who has the odd habit of referring to himself in the third person occasionally, addressed a packed out university theatre. He described the process of writing The Great War for Civilisation as being “very distressing. I was endlessly writing about gas and torture and death.” He was saved, he said, from total immersion in horrid memories by a friend who insisted he stop writing and “ walk by the sea and drink a pint of Guinness and think of other things.”
The book, Fisk says, is essentially about this father, who served in the first world war. “I didn’t go to see him when he was dying, and the chapter about him is an apology.” He was, Fisk says, “very right-wing”, but he earned his son’s eternal respect by refusing to command a military firing party during the war.
After his speech and the somewhat docile question and answers session that followed, Fisk received a standing ovation, which despite his apparent taste for the glitz of the book tour, appeared to genuinely humble him.
He is scheduled to return to Baghdad in December, and one must wonder how someone can shift so seamlessly between a world of packed-out speeches, flashing cameras and book signings and one as morbid as Baghdad. But such is the level of bloodshed at the moment that Fisk, one of the world’s most experienced war correspondents, has “serious doubts” about returning to Iraq. “Free reporting is finishing there. It’s so dangerous now in Iraq, it’s the most dangerous story I’ve ever covered. The state of Iraqi anarchy needs to be seen to be believed. Iraq is moving into deeper and darker phases. The project is over. Iraq is gone.”
But such morbid predictions haven’t dampened the spirit of Bob Fisk. Before, during and after his speech, he is brimful of humour. He is also refreshingly humble, carrying his own plastic chair down the steps of the theatre, and sitting on the steps of the theatre for a while too. But behind the joviality of the occasion, there is a deep sense of conviction based upon thirty years of being immersed in human tragedy. “If you saw what we saw”, he says “you would never support a war”.