I've got a few other ideas here today that will hopefully go mainstream and I'll also talk about some of the issues around and some of the obstacles to making innovative technologies mainstream and all that. I'd like to talk a little bit about the situation we've got on the North Coast here in relation to issues surrounding sustainable management of water and nutrients, talk a little bit about that relationship between technology and culture and the obstacles to moving ahead with innovation.

There are some really good case studies around the world and other parts of Australia that I would like to show where people are moving ahead and thinking outside the square and doing some interesting stuff, a little bit of theory and then a few local case studies .the issue of population and people tell us the population on the North Coast is going to double in the next 20- 40 years and after that it will probably keep growing and it's very difficult in a so called free society to stop the movement of people. So that looks like a given and we can ask ourselves what is the impact and ramification on the environment. Well Paul erlick had a formula, that is that impact equals the number of people multiplied by a factor which he related to the amount of material that they consume in their lifetime, and that's a life style factor and the third factor is a factor related to the types of technologies the society deploys to manage those material outputs.

So if we have a look at our population there's not a lot we can do about it , it look s like it will be doubled in the next 40 years so that factor is going to go up . I'm assuming, I might be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that the amount of material people consume in their life times won't go down in the next 40 .I want to suggest here that the one factor that we can do something about is the technology factor and I want to suggest that none of the technologies that we need, particularly rocket science there pretty standard technologies but the main problem is overcoming cultural obstacles to seeing them be deployed and we can hold the line in terms of our impact and maybe even see our impact dropping a little bit.

Technologies are a complicated one, their the infrastructure we create to achieve our life style objectives, the gismos , a simple one is we could say it's the built environment , anything that nature didn't put there tends to be that we can regard as a technology. The question is and a question that I'm very interested in is the way in which technology and culture and by culture I mean the collective head space, the set of values and belief that a society has about the way the world works and the way inn which they interact and we are aware that technology effects culture, we are aware for instance that you and I have different view of the world than our grandparents did because of telephones and computers and videos and so on and also culture effects technology different societies over the eons have developed different technologies and so on the one hand we can say that the way that we see the world effects what we do to the world and on the other hand we can say that what we do to the world effects the way we see the world so there's this loop, what systems annalists call a positive feed back loop and what I want to suggest is that each time that we make a decision about culture or about technology, a new development the way we do that new development, is going to effect the head space of the people that live there and visa versa they will make decisions that will effect the technologies that they build and so on.

So that's an interesting relationship, and I believe a very important relationship and we can look at two different world views if we like, we can look at , shall we say the world view, the techno view that creates techno systems that's input output systems resource, consumption and then the creation of effluence that's waste or we can look at another one which we might call a more ecological view of the world and the sorts of world views and technologies that we might create if we have those sets of beliefs and values about how the world works and how to keep it working sustainability. They were a couple of views about world views and the technologies that they might create.

What I want to look at now are two built environments that I think are having a positive impact culturally. One is the University of British Columbia in vancouva .There are three hundred people working in this office building, it's the school of oriental studies and that office building generates only 500 litres of waste water per day and that waste water is delt with on site by this gravel bed with some reedy type plants build in there the water infiltrates down into the water table where it waters the deep rooted landscaping vegetation. Now a normal building of that size, a normal office building would usually generate about 3,000 litres per day so in other words 93% of the waste water there is being eliminated and therefore the impact on the environment is being reduced by an order of magnitude and the university is saving money by not having to be hooked up to the city's waste water management system.

The reason, or one of the main reasons is that all the human excreta that's generated there is delt with by these five composting chambers in the basement of the building. The building also has a lot of other energy efficient features as well but we don't have time to talk about energy in this particular talk. Another one closer to home is the Albury campus of Charles Sturt University. The buildings are made of rammed earth with ventilation towers and they generate movement of air through the building, eliminating the need for any form of air conditioning. The rain water tank have been made into an architectural feature, which id nothing to be ashamed of they show them off an the water that is captured there is used, there are solar hot water panels on the roof and that hot water is pumped through the floors of the building to warm the building up at night.

In other words the thermal effects of buffering are used to advantaged and these systems are quite sophisticate, there controlled by computers and so on. Once again there's no flush toilets there all composting toilets, everyone's very happy with those, the grey water is delt with in reed beds and the storm water is captured in ponds and treated in reed beds and all the water is pumped up a hill to a windmill and a large tank or pond there and it's feed down by gravity to irrigate landscaping as required. The point I want to make about that Marcy Webster Banister is the architect for Charles Sturt University, she had a vision of creating a sustainable campus, they knew they were going to have to build this whole campus from the ground up and David Mitchell is a retired CSIRO head of division and he was involved in research into water cycle management and he retired there to take up a position as meritous professor which means he didn't get paid, he just had an office and a computer and he said that he had never worked so hard in his life, he's a wonderful old bloke and an inspiration to many of us in this field but those two people with some influence and a vision, in other words with a cultural attitude they convinced the people who signed the cheques at Charles Sturt University that this was a good way to go, that this would bring credit to the university and so on and we now have a campus there which is feeding back into the beliefs of and values of the students that so and us it.

So here that feed back loop culture effects built environment which in term culture and so on. Ok so we've got this word called waste and it's really just material that have been through a house or a village or a city and want to know what to do with them. In nature of course there is no such thing as waste. Now waste mangers have got this five level hierarchy that they talk about they say the best way to deal with waste is avoidance, don't make it in the first place if you do make a small mess and then find something to do with the results of the activity in other words reuse or recycle and only as a last resort do we have disposal. So we can summarise that down into three points, or I like to simplify it source, control, reuse or disposal as a last resort.

So if we look at that house which we can use to represent a home or a small cluster of homes or a village or even a city we say what goes in terms of domestic material flows well what goes into the average home is water food what I call packaging and publications that's newspapers and things like that and all the stuff that comes wrapped around all those appliances that we seem to buy regularly and so many home here on the North Coast any way, have a yard which generates waste so these are the things that come out, polluted water , human excreta, package and publications once again after were read them or taken them off the appliance, we've got the yard waste and then we've got the broken down appliances.

So we can divide that up into three discreet waste streams. We've got the aqueous waste stream aqua meaning water which normally speaking in a conventional house would leave the house suspended in water, there's the solid organic and the solid inorganic and surveys in Lismore have shown that 70% of the solid waste that goes out is actually solid organic in other words compostable material. I want to suggest that we can do a slight rearrangement of that and here on the North coast a few of us have been doing this, we have been moving human excreta from the aqueous waste stream to the solid organic waste stream. Making that shift complies with a couple of other principals of waste management that waste managers tend to keep in the back of their minds don't dilute effluent's and source control in other words keep things a close, deal with things as close to the source as possible.

If we were now to look at how we deal with that solid organic waste stream, what I'm suggesting here is that human excreta, the indoor stuff, the stuff we tend to generate indoors goes into a composting chamber and council sends around a chipper. Instead of coming around and picking up the hedge trimmings and tree branches and so on and taking them away they actually come around with the chipper, put them trough the chipper and leave them on the pavement and them you wheel barrow them back inside and they go into the composting chamber .After a period of time the compost comes out, It's reapplied to the yard, in the yard you go fruit and veg and so on and all of a sudden what we've got here is two cycles. In everybody's yard or this can be at a single household level or at a cluster level or whatever at any level you can imagine, we've got a number of cycles and we've got a number of people participating in those cycles and there's an old saying, I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.

So we've got people participating in these cycles and there by once again generating this culture of sustainability and understanding. What I'm presenting here is a very simplified point of view and there is all sorts of layers of around this such as the cultural and bureaucratic layers. That's one thing we have to be aware of, but when you look at it there is very little research that has been done on this. One of the things were trying to do is mount research programs and it's very difficult to do but instead of these beliefs and we all grow up with the belief that there are these nasty germs waiting to grab us but were now told that if were not exposed to some of these germs at an early age we'll grow up having asthma and so on . so it may well be that we have overdone the sterility thing.

This is the first composting toilet that I ever built and what I'm now proposing is that we build a composting chamber into which we pooh rather than into a composting toilet into which we add scraps to make it a more comprehensive thing because when you thing about it the amount of material that we generate from our bodies is fairly small compared to all this other stuff like yard waste and the newspapers. One Sydney Morning Herald would be enough carbonous bulking material to do a composting toilet for a family of five for a month. So Lismore is the composting dunny capital of Australia, we've got 250 of the 1340 and when we did that survey we were quite amazed that there were 1350 domestic composting toilets in NSW so things are moving ahead.

Cycles should be closed locally, this is a set of principals that I promote, should be close locally, visibly and elegantly so as to maximise the cultural impact. We've been very big on composting toilets here on the North Coast there's another thing that comes out of Scandinavia but it's been taken up in places like China and Vietnam eco-sanitation where they have urine separating toilets. And two villages in Norway are getting on to this process. It's being promoted by the local authorities and they go around collecting urine and injecting it into agricultural soil, so closing the cycle that way . 80% of the nitrogen in domestic waste water is urine, 10% from pooh and the other 10% from other sources.