Today' feature is Pam Morris who completed stage four of the part time course last year. Her final folio 'Window of Opportunity' shows a photo essay highlighting opportunities for society to minimise waste and optimise reuse.
"Our technologically advanced society accepts organ transplants as being commonplace. We recognise the enormous benefits of harvesting healthy body organs from the dying, to potentiate the lives of the living. By taking this concept of recycling discarded items from the 'outmoded', to rebirth them in the 'new'; across other facets of our lives, using the building industry as an example of one place we can all start"
"Over the past decade our major Australian capital cities have experienced a massive building boom, as local and overseas investors have bought up choice suburban properties for high density development. The most lucrative properties are those with large blocks, close to the city and public transport, which unfortunately tend to belong to our city’s older heritage housing stock."'
"These hand-crafted historic homes are being rapidly replaced with a swathe of modern multi-development town houses. Whilst we mourn the loss of these unique beautiful old homes, we often fail to consider the secondary more insidious environmental impact of their demolition generating tonnes of building rubble. It is estimated that over 90% of building demolition waste ends up in landfill, which overtime will become a significant environmental hazard as it decomposes and leaches toxins and hazardous substances into our soil and ground water. Although over the last 30 years there has been an increased public awareness of optimising our domestic use of renewable energy and recycling our household garbage, unfortunately the building industry has generally been very slow in adopting a reduce, reuse and recycle philosophy; primarily because it is just not profitable."
"Ultimately it comes down to us as consumers to reduce the waste in the first place by retaining our structurally sound buildings but if we do have to rebuild, then create sufficient market demand so that architects, designers and builders optimise recycled or reused materials as standard practice in their construction process."
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