Happen Films

Life with Less Waste

• How a Family of 5 make almost Zero Waste - YouTube Video
• They are primarily conserned about the cummulative negative impact of the consumption of single-use plastic bags, packaging and even coffee cups.
• The average household in Australia produces three 3-bedroom houses worth of waste a year!
• Food packaging forms a large amount of household waste – use reusable bags and containers when buying food products or household consumables.
• Buy food in bulk. They take bags and containers to shops where they can be refilled. This way they avoid packaging and advertising. Milk is bought in resuable glass bottles.
• Try to avoid packaging where possible. It takes lots of energy to recycle and it is very hard to understand where recyclables end up.
• Up to 40% of houshold waste is organic and can be composted. Compost all food and kitchen scraps at home then use the compost to grow fruit and vegetables.
• Kitchen waste is fed to their chickens and some of the food waste is composted under fruit trees.
• They bake their own bread and preserve fruits from garden (e.g. Mulberries, applies, quinces)
• Avoid synthetic materials in clothing because they can't be easily recycled at the end of the life. Ideally, all old clothing should be composted. Buy quality clothing and learn how to make small repairs.
• Try to keep what you have for as long as possible with appropriate care and repair.
• Everyone needs to take more responsibility for waste production, including households. If households make the first change, then this will start to influence the community at large and then governments.

Degrowth in the Suburbs

• Sustainable City Living on 1/10th of an Acre - YouTube Video
• Themes include both sustainability and houshold resilience / self-sufficiency
• They explain that degrowth is a planned contraction of consumption to help the planet pull back from ecological overshoot and allow poorer developing countries to improve their material standard of living.
• They also believe that we can't run a globalised consumer society just on green energy and we will also need to reduce to total amount of energy consumption on the planet.
• Some of the examples of resilience that are presented in the video include:
  • Planting vegetable gardens and fruit trees.
  • Producing, cooking and preserving food is important, including fermented drinks.
  • Using a solar oven to cook eggs and bread
  • Installing 2 kW of PV solar panels to feed electricity onto the grid.
  • Disconnecting from natural gas and instead producing biogas generated from food waste collected from the neighbourhood. They use the biogas generator to produce gas for cooking and hot water for showering.
  • Their shower is outdoors so they can more easily use the grey water on the garden.
  • Rainwater tanks capture roof water for watering the garden.
  • They make clothes and have a repair culture in the household. This helps them be less wasteful and more self-sufficient.
  • Both adults in the household work 4 days a week, so they can spend more time in the houshold economy.
  • They can aford this because they are thoughful and frugal with money, and practise voluntary simplicity. They live as simply as they can by minimising material possessions. They don't need to fund high consumption living.
  • They own a car, but they rarely use it. They registered their car on the Car Next Door platform so that other people can share their car. People pay a daily or hourly charge and a charge per kilometer.
• In summary, they want to explore the good life through non-materialistic ways (influenced by literary works of Henry David Thoreau)
• They also advocate for community engagement and collective action to help mobilise broader change beyond the range of the household.