Jobs and biz news: Chris Minns, IKEA, green concrete, Engineers … – The Fifth Estate

by | May 17, 2023 | Engineer

The Fifth Estate
Green buildings and sustainable cities – news and views
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has ordered housing developers to identify tracts of public land in urban areas around transport hubs with proximity to essential services and community amenities. that could be rezoned for housing to tackle the supply and affordability crisis.
“If we are going to build 314,000 new homes over the next five years under the National Housing Accord, we need to look at all the tools in the kit – including new planning policies, rezoning and major land release to hit our targets,” Minns said on Tuesday.
The National Housing Accord calls for the construction of 1 million homes nationally by 2030.
Minns said the most suitable sites were likely to be in urban areas.This would help avoid further urban sprawl and the need for costly infrastructure upgrades.
IKEA is trialling electric tuk tuks for customer deliveries in Sydney as part of a three-month zero emissions trial.
Two electric tuk tuks will manage deliveries of smaller items and furniture weighing up to 40kg to addresses within a 10km radius of IKEA’s Tempe showroom south of the Sydney CBD.
The move is part of IKEA’s global ambition to provide 100 per cent zero emissions deliveries by 2025. It is the first time in Australias history that electric tuk tuks will be driven on Australian roads.
Tuk tuks are a three-wheeled vehicle with a small drivers seat in the front and a flatbed truck in the rear, powered by a 9kWh swappable battery. Internal combustion engine versions are most commonly seen in India and Thailand, where they earned the name “Tuk tuk” from the sound the engine makes as it putters along.
Australia has vast untapped potential for green concrete, which uses recycled materials and minimises the use of emissions-intensive Portland cement, according to a new report.
The report, authored by Dr Ezgi Kaya, a structural engineer at consultancy Hatch, stated that green concrete has been used in more than 60 projects across Australia including infrastructure, buildings, industrial, marine and geotechnical projects. Green concrete can reduce embodied carbon emissions by as much as 80 per cent, incorporating recycled aggregates, fly ash, silica fume and slag.
“Replacing just 50 per cent of traditional concrete with green concrete could reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by approximately 17 million tonnes annually, which is equivalent to removing four million cars from the road,” Dr Kaya said in a statement.
Besides reduced carbon emissions, green concrete has better durability than traditional concrete and is more resistant to shrinking and cracking and can provide better energy efficiency with its superior insulation properties. While it costs more upfront, green concrete can save on maintenance and repair charges over its lifetime, the report stated.
Green concrete uses materials that would otherwise have ended up in landfill, thus reducing industrial waste volumes.
So many people are having a go at measuring embodied carbon and now the Engineers Australia has founded the Climate Smart Engineering Initiative in order to finid a . Aimed at standardised measurement and calculation of embodied carbon in the built environment on a life cycle basis.
The working group will oversee a preliminary review of best practice for calculating greenhouse emissions. The analysis will help engineers develop robust carbon measurement approaches.
Two senior Engineers Australia office bearers will lead the group, and the professional body is seeking eight to 10 Chartered Engineers to join the group, which will meet regularly over a four-month period to carry out the analysis in the form of guidance documents and/or practice notes.
The body seeks engineers with knowledge of relevant Australian standards, regulatory authorities and infrastructure agencies.
EA is a partner of the Materials and Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance.
Eileen Newbury, the marketer who was instrumental in raising the profile and sustainability nous of Forest and Wood Products Australia, has quit after almost a decade with the industry body to found her own consultancy practice.
Newbury said via LinkedIn she is also open to board directorships, and that her consultancy work at LeadingEdge will revolve around marketing strategy, business development and events.
Sarah Downey will step into Newbury’s head of marketing and communications role at the FWPA. Downey has been with the association for two years, and will begin in her new position on May 22.
Design studio MEK reduced the carbon emissions of its website by two-thirds during its recent relaunch. The studio decided to reduce the emissions associated with its website when it learned that the site used 145.6kgCO2e annually, equivalent to the same amount of electricity needed to power an electric car 2108 kilometres
The overhaul included cleaning unnecessary HTML code which was sending a high volume of requests to the server, impacting the overall site speed and user experience. A reduction in the number of fonts used resulted in fewer server requests, and a streamlined colour palette that minimised the amount of white, the most energy-intensive shade because it comprises all the colours in the spectrum.
Images used on the site are now less than 500kb and compressed to minimise file handing times. The new site only has static images and notfvideo and are only displayed as the user scrolls down.
MEK’s new site produces only 0.42gCO2 per unique visit, down from 1.21g under the old site.
As an aside, The Fifth Estate produces only 0.25g of CO2 each time someone visits the site. Over a year, this equates to 29.82kg of CO2, the same weight as 0.2 sumo wrestlers, according to websitecarbon.com.
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