Queensland businesses taking climate action

Climate action to me is just looking after our environment. If we can take care of our landfill, that's one way we can look after our climate.

My name's Garry Bettiens chair of the Barcaldine Aged Care Group, which was formed 14 years ago. The aim of the group is to raise money to build accommodation like independent living units for age and disability, where they've got no steps, no trip hazards, all that sort of stuff.

We collect cans and bottles from local hotels, to donate towards aged care and recycling. Every week there's at least 25 cubic metres. This week it's actually 50 cubic metres of waste that doesn't go to our landfill. That gets taken away for recycling.

I'm Rob Chandler. I'm a Barcaldine local, part of the volunteer team that help recycling bottles and cans and cardboard on a Saturday morning. And it's a lot of fun.

Four years ago, COEX Containers for Change rang me at the shop, to ask if there was anyone that wanted the Containers for Change program in the Barcaldine area. I just decided well, we'll do it for the aged care.

To date, we've probably raised almost half a million dollars out of it, which goes into building units for the aged persons.

Well, I didn't realise how good it was going to be until I was run over by a car about 15 months ago. The hallway is wide enough for wheelchairs. The bedroom is wide enough for a wheelchair on both sides. It's been really helpful.

We've got six units at the moment and they're all full and we do have a waiting list. So the more recycling we can do, the more money we can make to build more units.

A community like Barcaldine within the next few years could be a zero waste community. I'm convinced now it's the way to go. It's the right thing to do. And when you stop and look at it, it's quite simple.

People can go about climate action to make a difference in their everyday life, to make sure they recycle, make sure that they save water, make sure that they're saving electricity. And this is good because it's saving the environment that's also helping this community. And they've also got the green future to look forward to.

What does climate action mean to me?

It means doing what we can when we can as often as we can. We never can do everything, but if we all do just a little bit, we'll make a big difference.

My name is Chris, I run Sassafras of Paddington in Paddington, Brisbane, we are a sustainable cafe. So I'm a chef by trade and grew up on a cattle and small crops mixed farm, which means that we were fairly well self-sufficient, sustainable for the environment, but we were also able to enjoy the benefits of that, and that has really instilled in me a philosophy to carry that on and do the same thing and bring that to the city, share that philosophy with the rest of the world.

So when I took over Sassafras here about 10 years back, we used to use just general waste bins, so to put it in perspective, we were using about 10 wheelie bins a week. There was a few problems arising from that, one, it was the cost involved, two, we had pest and vermin, three, during summer, all of that material, 'cause it was only being collected once a week, was starting to create a bit of a bad odour, and we needed to solve all of these problems. And we started to look at our organic waste and trying to find a solution for having that waste not go into landfill, and also, to have it collected more readily, how we would store that waste, how we would get that waste transported to a composting plant.

So we started working with a contractor who was able to collect our organic waste a few times a week, and that helped us to eliminate the odours and the pests and the vermin problem that we had. It also enabled us to reduce the amount of landfill from 10 wheelie bins a week down to just two.

We've been able to save about a tonne of waste from going to landfill every month. So over the year, we're looking at saving greenhouse gas emissions by not sending all our organic waste to landfill. We also turn all of our used cooking oil into biodiesel, both of those help us save quite a lot of emissions each year.

I would encourage other hospitality businesses to jump on board and have a look online for some great resources. There are definitely contractors out there who can help you out for a very, very good price to effectively take care of your waste. By doing this, it's actually saving us up to 50% costs on our waste management, and it's helping to reduce our other purchases, probably by about 10 to 15% over the year as well.

It's not as difficult as it seems to get yourself on board, and it actually makes economic sense to do so.

Climate action means to me finding the best way for us to coexist within fragile natural systems.

As a team of designers, landscape architects, architects, and urban designers, we really are very keen on sustainability in terms of our profession.

What we wanted to do really was to try to practice what we preach in terms of our professional life.

So the key things that LatStudios really are doing to reduce greenhouse emissions are to reduce waste going to landfill, and that's our big focus.

And that's really through two streams. We've got organic waste stream, which is the thing I'm most passionate about, and then we've got the inorganic waste stream, which Zara takes care of.

We've implemented a variety of measures to redirect waste from landfill into streams to recycle, or avoiding the items altogether by bringing in reusables, like reusable cups, and cutlery, and plates.

One of our first steps really was to start taking home the organic waste. But that's grown over time, so now we have an office worm farm.

We've managed to accommodate our worm farm in the cupboard, so it really can be done even in a city office.

We've seen a decrease in the amount of rubbish and recycling by 20 to 25%. The entire proportion of what we're disposing of has decreased significantly.

Draw on the passions of the staff because we can do a lot more collectively than we can on our own.

We always say, with design, just begin anywhere. It's the same with this process, reducing emissions and making a healthier future.

Climate action means to make a change, make a difference towards reducing our carbon footprint and reducing our impact on the Earth.

To me, the key word is action, is to take action. The world's changing, so I think it's important that everybody jump on board and not get left behind.

Kith & Kin's a disability service, and we operate a learning centre here, and we also provide outreach services in people's homes, and we basically help people with disabilities to get out into their communities and do the things that they want to do.

One of the original board members was really passionate about climate change and wanted to make a difference as well as assist Kith & Kin to save money and make changes for us to be sustainable long term.

We've transitioned 50% of our fleet to hybrid. As the technology becomes available with hybrid and electric, and down the track, possibly hydrogen, we'll transition our whole fleet to being more sustainable.

This building for instance has got 120 solar panels and we'd like to put more up, in the future, we're looking at batteries within the next 12 months, so that we can capture more savings and spread that energy usage out.

It directly helps us do activities with our participants, they get really excited and into the recycling and the gardening group and growing their own vegetables and their own plants and showing each other basically what they have made and what they've done.

And that really translates into us as a whole, being able to show everyone what we're doing and what we've done and how it benefits not only us, but also the participants, and then, obviously, the world.

If you've got capital and you invest it, it's certainly worthwhile in terms of having great returns on not only financially, but socially, and the community organisations that maybe don't have the capital, then certainly, seek out some grants, participate in being more sustainable, it's something that we can all do.

Start small, it doesn't have to be big changes first, you can start small and work your way forward.

Climate action to me is a way of thinking. It's about changing the way that we see things.

Pulling together with other businesses as a community to reach our climate goals, as a country and as a planet.

Every business is very different, and the way that we approached climate action and sustainability was taking ourselves out of the box and thinking, okay, this is the way something has traditionally been done.

How can we look at this in a different light so that we can get a different result? Energy is a major input into the business, and whatever we can save also saves energy off the grid.

Our solar system was installed about four years ago, so 30 percent of our power comes from solar power.

Water coming in as town water, as a by-product of the process is actually heated and reused as hot water which saves us using new town water. So there's a huge element of energy saving there.

With the greenhouse emissions, we've looked at all our waste. We've watched our processes so we minimise any rejections down, I think we're below 1 percent.

We have a company down the road who takes our cardboard and reuses them, and with customers, we actually now go pick up the cores, boxes and plastic and reuse that again.

It's really important for consumers these days to know that the products that they're buying, stands for something good. People want to feel connected to the things that they're purchasing.

Don't just get caught into that mindset, that this is the way we've always done it.

Look at your business as a whole. Look at your supply chain. Look at your everyday processes.

What can you do in amongst everything that is really going to make an impact?

Climate action for me personally is about reducing your footprint for now leaving it in a better place for future generations than what it is right now.

My name's Fiona Lidgett, and myself and my husband, Martin, own Townsville Eco Resort, and we've been here for around nine years now.

Just before the floods, we installed solar PV and battery backup, that has reduced our power bills by half and reduces the carbon emissions.

We have also made use of white roofing systems for cooling effect and things like that, ensured our lighting is LED, our lighting is on timing as well.

We have a number of recycling programs in place where we mulch a lot of our green waste on site to reduce emissions, we do recycling for our cans and bottles and things, and the money that we earn back from that goes into habitat protection within the park.

When we took over, we had water fail in the first week of our ownership, and we came up with the option of a reverse osmosis system. We constructed the wetland, which purifies all our onsite wastewater.

As an advanced ecotourism business, we very much support our local region in ecotourism, especially, we're right in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.

The constructed wetland helps with water runoff to the reef, it enables that water to be very clean. The ecosystems in the Great Barrier Reef catchment are very unique and very interesting as an ecological professional, so the resort allows people, academics, and visitors a chance to interact with the wetland that's not commonly in an urban area.

So Atlas Soils involvement was around biological best practice on the banks of the wetland, and so, that's very much about activating the biology that keeps that wetland system functioning optimally.

There's been a huge benefit to us in the environment here, we've seen a lot of wildlife return.

It's important to know that you don't have to have a huge business to be able to start somewhere, it might be recycling your paper, it might be putting some solar in, and it's just a matter of exploring those options available.

We're very proud that Townsville region has a great base and a great support network for implementing environmental initiatives and supporting climate action from local council to local government to small businesses.

If you don't have the knowledge, you've got to reach out to the people that have it that can hold your hand along the way.