Leftovers

I have a passion for compost. That’s not something I often admit in casual conversation but I’m not ashamed of it. I think compost could save the world and I don’t just mean by reducing waste and using it as a growing medium, it’s also a wonderful educational tool. There is something beautiful about waste breaking down naturally and then being used again to sustain life. Compost can get people back in touch with nature and can help them understand that life is actually sustainable and rewarding if we make the right choices and take some responsibility for our own impact on the environment. Is my passion so crazy?

One Brighton has a composter, a Big Hanna, a machine which mechanically breaks down food waste. It’s a pretty impressive piece of kit and although I don’t know the exact figure, I’m pretty sure it was very expensive to install. I suppose it was necessary if food composting was ever going to happen in a residential development such as this. After all, who is going to buy a brand new apartment situated next to a smelly and ugly compost heap? Any form of composting that could have happened here would have had to have been sanitised as much as possible if it was ever to be a selling point.

For the resident, composting food waste is a pretty simple process. They collect biodegradable bags from me, fill them with whatever organic material they fancy (the Big Hanna will even take meat and bones) and then dispose of them down a waste chute outside. From there, the bag falls into a bin below ground in a bin store where I fish them out and feed them to Big Hanna. It should be pretty straightforward but of course there have been a few challenges. Introducing technology to a natural process does seem to complicate things. The machine needs to be monitored daily and it needs a certain amount of tech savvy to keep it maintained but it does speed up the composting process dramatically and any odours are drawn away through an elaborate ventilation system. The real problems seem to stem from the disconnection from what happens above ground and what has to happen below ground.

From the point somebody drops a biodegradable bag full of discarded food down the waste chute, their job is done. Anything that happens beyond this point has been locked away from view. So in reality, composting at the moment has limited potential as an educational tool. However, currently this is the least of my worries. I wish it was only food I had to fish out of the bin! I won’t go into too much detail but I’ve found electrical equipment, pieces of furniture, cat litter and a wide variety of contraceptives in the bin. About 75% of the waste I take out of the bin is big refuse sacks full of non-compostable rubbish. The main focus of education at the moment purely seems to involve trying to get people to put the right waste down the right chute.

The first hurdle involved getting people to use the compostable bags because the Big Hanna needs a certain amount of organic material to run optimally, the poor thing was starving! So I put notices up, discussed it in the newsletter and tried to promote Hanna as if she was a valuable member of the community who just needed a bit of TLC and some scraps from the kitchen. Success has ebbed and flowed, unfortunately not everybody at One Brighton has understood the concept of waste segregation and often this is just down to cultural issues and language barriers (this is a topic I’ll bring up in a future blog). I have had to stop people trying to dump bags full of aluminium cans down the food waste chute but this does tend to be a genuinely innocent mistake, Coca-Cola is a food after all.

The art of composting (yes,it is an art) is a bit like baking a cake, the ingredients have to be just right. You need a good mix of browns (e.g. cardboard, newspaper, wood pellets) and greens (e.g. leaves, bananas, not coke cans), so that the mix of carbon and nitrogen is just right. The real fun begins when you reach the ‘Goldilocks’ mix. This is when the micro-organisms start to populate the mixture and the whole mess heats up and breaks down. Of course this is simplifying the science of composting but after a lot of temperature monitoring, weighing, some blown fuses and blockages (and developing a strong stomach), we’ve finally reached the stage of getting the right mix at One Brighton. The first batch of compost is in its maturation stage in a special bin i.e. a wheelie bin I found on the side of a road and some cooker grills I bought from a local skip. This compost is destined to be used in our planters and roof-top allotments, which is where the reward will come from all the hard work.

At the moment, I can’t see the One Brighton community being involved in the magic of composting any further than the point they drop their food bags down the chute. Perhaps in the future, curiosity will get the better of them and they will start enquiring but right now the goal is to get everybody understanding the process and what needs to happen before collecting food waste actually becomes worthwhile. We can then, maybe, hopefully, move to the next step where people actually become more hands on with Big Hanna, appreciating the challenge but also the value of making something useful out of waste.

Distance

Yes, it's been a while since I've updated this blog. It probably would have been cathartic to have been logging my thoughts in this over the past few months but work up until now has just been about keeping my head above water. In a word, it's been unsustainable. I've wanted to plan for the future but I’ve simply been going from day to day.


Distance and perspective is what I've needed, so I went on a short holiday and tried to look at life from a different angle. When I had the chance of a week off at the end of August, I took a ferry from Portsmouth with my girlfriend and travelled across the channel to France. We cycled across Britanny to the centre of Normandy, the destination being an Earthship. An Earthship, for those of you who don't know, is a completely self-sustaining building which is made out of recycled material. Please visit http://web.me.com/kevantrott/Site/Welcome.html for more details.


We enjoyed the holiday a lot and particularly the comfort and solitude that the Earthship offered. Not that the Earthship didn't have its problems, the bedrooms were dark, the toilet had an odd odour, the energy saving light bulbs were very dim and the shower wasn't always warm. However, this didn't detract from the benefits I got from the experience. Sometimes the most important things are the ones that are most difficult to perceive. The Earthship offered peace and a sense that it was safe to be isolated from the rest of the world and yet at the same time I felt very connected to my living environment and my own place in it.


On the last day of our holiday, I opened up the guestbook. Amongst the messages of support and advice there was plenty of criticism. There were complaints about the shower not being hot, the temperature of the rooms, even the hardness of the floor. These things may well have been true but I half expected to find a comment about the water being too wet! This got me thinking about our expectations of green living.


I was lucky enough to speak briefly with one of the owners of the Earthship recently. She told me that they were trying to sell up and that the experience had been quite disheartening, the word she used repeatedly was 'naive'. I wanted to delve deeper into what she meant by 'naive'. Was it the money that was invested in the project? Was it the time that it took to build? Was it their own expectations of what the Earthship would offer?


One Brighton was sold to people as one of the most sustainable developments in the UK. With this title came a great weight of expectation. Living in One Brighton isn’t an end in itself, whilst sustainable energy and minimal waste and healthier living have been designed into the development, these factors don’t automatically generate happiness and unfortunately that’s what people are trying to buy. We are responsible for our own happiness and everybody has a different definition of what that particular word means. Happiness cannot be branded or packaged and it is incredibly difficult to define.


A green lifestyle isn’t a panacea for all of life’s ills. It isn’t even necessarily a happier lifestyle, it is however a more sustainable one. It’s sustainability that we need to define rather than happiness and there has to be a clear distinction between the two. When I worked in the sustainability team in Brighton and Hove City Council, the office would get calls from the public on a wide range of issues, everything from dog mess on the streets to noisy neighbours, areas that were well outside of our remit. Too often people would confuse a barrier to their own happiness with unsustainability.


When we brand a product, a lifestyle or a building development, as being ‘sustainable’, we automatically make ourselves a target for criticism, simply because people have such high expectations. However, it’s difficult to determine when sustainability is actually achieved and in fact it isn't anything that can be achieved if we can't define it. The 10 One Planet Living principles are useful aspirations and guidelines but they aren't definitions of what sustainability actually is. The inclusion of health and happiness as a principle has always made me feel that the development is offering something that is impossible to package and when happiness is used as a selling point it can only leave some people disappointed.


I’m optimistic that someday ‘sustainable living’ will simply be called ‘living’ but in the meantime we are stuck with the reality that we have to sell sustainability to people as if it were a car, a holiday or a brand. An overused quote of Gandhi’s is: “Live simply so that others can simply live” but it’s a good principle to live by in this increasingly commercialised world. We’re responsible for the well-being of a future generation but we’re responsible for our own happiness. Perhaps if we could put more value in our responsibility for each other, even for those yet unknown generations, then maybe we’ll have some appreciation of what true sustainability is. It’s often the things that are the most difficult to perceive that turn out to be the most important.

The Office

The Office

As you might have gathered from the previous blog, my job is pretty varied and a large proportion of it involves desk work. My hub for this is a concierge office at the entrance to the Brighton Belle building.

By caretaking standards my office is a luxury. It has a large desk with a computer and printer, some shelving, a sink and kettle and a separate toilet/cleaners cupboard. The server for the CCTV system occupies space in the corner of the room. Of course, as part of my job is as a concierge, I need to be able to see people passing by and residents need to know when I’m in. Therefore, whilst the room is completely enclosed, there is a large glass panel looking out into the foyer area so I can see people passing by and they can see me. To sum up my feelings about the office, it seems like a bit of an aquarium and I’m the exhibit.

Naturally, I welcome visits from residents when they need me for whatever reason or just fancy a chat. I enjoy interacting with all the characters that live in One Brighton. However, to say it’s a distraction from the desk job would be a bit of an understatement. Even without the conversations at the door (which I need to leave open by the way because the aquarium feels more like a sauna, with the CCTV server going 24/7 and there being no ventilation), there’s non stop traffic through the foyer area during the week, with the construction company still on site, the residents mail boxes directly opposite and delivery men dropping off parcels. I am on display whenever I’m trying to get work done.

There is a settling in period at the moment for residents. New people are moving in all the time and with each new arrival come new questions either by phone, email or in person. Questions like, “Why doesn’t my washing machine have any water in it?” and “Why can’t I park my car here, the letting agency said it was fine?”. I know that things will eventually calm down and people will become accustomed to living in a new development with a new philosophy. Perhaps I’m just being impatient to get my teeth into aspects of One Brighton where I can apply my knowledge more directly.

I much prefer interacting with people when I’m outside, sweeping the grounds or whatever job I happen to be doing at the time. I have the most useful conversations and I learn a lot about the people who live here when we’re outside and a natural exchange develops. I learn what people do for a living, why they moved here, what their interests are, who else they know and whether they know their neighbour. I’m learning that despite the difficult encounters I might have, there are so many decent people who live here. I met a lady about a month ago who lives in an apartment in the Pullman Haul block, she had found out that I had run the Brighton marathon for Cardiac Risk in the Young the previous week and congratulated me, she then took two pounds out of her handbag as a donation. Such kindness isn’t unusual. That’s something I need to remember, wherever I might be.

I’ve been asked to design the new office for the Green Caretaker of a new One Planet development to be built in Middlesbrough called Riverside One. This will be a project I’m going to take my time on.

Anybody fancy a pint?

Green adjective concerned with protection of the environment; (of a product) not harmful to the environment.

Caretaker noun a person employed to look after a house or building.

Caretaker is a bit of a misnomer, if I had conceived the idea I might have used a different title. For most people the word caretaker suggests a school janitor, the guy with the mop and bucket when the kids have thrown up in the hallway. Somebody employed to maintain a building, pick up the rubbish, clean the walls, sweep the grounds, maybe oil a squeaky door, and lock up at the end of the day.

One Brighton is a development of 172 apartments in the very centre of Brighton, right next to the train station. It’s the world’s first fully accredited ‘One Planet’ residential development, a set of ten principles which are designed to minimise the use of resources and ensure the building process has a low environmental impact and residents live sustainable lifestyles. The principles cover: Zero carbon, Zero waste, Sustainable transport, Sustainable materials, Local and sustainable food, Sustainable water, Natural habitats and wildlife, Culture and heritage, Health and happiness.

I’ve been employed as the Green Caretaker for three months. In a nutshell, I’m at One Brighton to promote the use of the One Planet principles as the construction team leaves and the residents get settled in and to encourage a sustainable community into the future. You get a lot of London commuters living here but the demographic really covers all social strata with varying interest in the ‘Green’ theme.

Yes, the ten principles cover a lot of different and challenging issues but to most people I’m still very much the caretaker and not so much the ‘Green’ caretaker, so, I’ve been finding it particularly difficult finding the time and energy to devote to developing the community. I’m currently the concierge, binman, janitor, events coordinator, repair man, cleaner, community worker, website updater, security guard, gardener, social accountant, travel planner, grounds keeper, parking warden, environmental educator, parcel delivery man and even compost doctor. I’m the guy to go to when the neighbours are being anti-social (however serious or trivial). I’m also the target when the heating isn't working or there’s damage to a door or you can’t find your keys. The list goes on and I feel like I’m doing it all. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve worked in busy jobs before, the kinds of jobs where you have to act more on instinct than anything because there just isn’t time to find the rule book and if there were one it would be unlikely to have the solution for the particular situation you’ve found yourself in. The difference between this job and previous ones is that there are clear solutions but with the varying situations I find myself in, I need to change my frame of mind very regularly from the cerebral to the physical e.g. from giving a tour of the development or updating the community website to helping with the delivery of wood chip fuel or sorting out the recycling bins.

It’s physically, mentally and at times emotionally draining and it can be very lonely, despite all the people I work amongst and who pass by for a brief chat. I haven’t generally worked in the type of job where you can’t go for a pint with your colleagues at the end of the day. I guess the biggest problem is that I’m different things to different people at the moment. I don’t blame anybody for this. I expect this is part of the deal of landing in a role that hasn’t been tested before on a development that is an experiment in itself.

Of all the jobs that I have, the one that I think is the most important is defining the boundaries of my job description. When I’ve created the boundaries of what a Green Caretaker is and a job description that works and have seen it being applied to another development then I know that I really will have done my job. I met some people recently who will be working on a similar development in Middlesbrough in the near future and it excites me to think I might be asked for advice on what to expect.

At times I’ve felt a little discouraged; at times I’ve felt like I might as well just be called a ‘Green’ Janitor or ‘Green’ binman. Even the word ‘Green’ seems to suggest a green washing to some people, as British Petroleum might have done when they changed their logo from a green and yellow shield to a green and yellow flower and announced that they were “Looking to a Greener Future”. Am I just a value added version of a Caretaker?

I’m sorry if this sounds like I’m venting into cyberspace because a lot of the things that have happened to me over the past three months have been profoundly positive, I’ll tell you about them if you pop by this blog again some time. In a word, my work is a challenge, but it feels like the kind of challenge that at the same time feels like a bit of an adventure. I’m learning new things and meeting really interesting people and I’m applying the experiences that I’ve built up over the years in a constructive way.

To be completely honest, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.