Known as Crossways Farm Village, the new town is spectacularly located on the edge of the Van Staden’s River Gorge outside Port Elizabeth. On 2 December in the presence of Mr Gugile Nkwinti, Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, work will start on the installation of all services for the first residential and industrial phases. All the industrial stands and 70% of the residential stands in these phases have been sold. Construction of the first houses was expected to start by April next year.

The industrial stands, located some distance from the residential nodes, are intended for light cottage industries with a strong artisanal and agri-processing character.

design, planning and implementation

CMAI, the firm of Dr Chris Mulder, is responsible for the design, planning and implementation of the R3,4bn project. Dr Mulder, whose Thesen Islands project in the Knysna lagoon won two CNBC International Property Development Awards in 2007, said Crossways Farm Village would combine the benefits of a healthy rural existence with all the conveniences of sophisticated urban living.

The town consists of 747 residential stands of varying sizes divided into neighbourhoods spread throughout the 563 ha site of which more than half would be a conservation area. The plans for the development were approved earlier without any preconditions by the Department of Economic Affairs, Environment and Tourism of the Eastern Cape as well as by the national Department of Agriculture.

Mulder said Crossways was expected to set the benchmark for green building practises and would be the most advanced town in South Africa because of its high-tech infrastructure. “We plan to take the entire town of almost 800 stands off the national grid by means of photovoltaic technology which will provide us with a total alternative energy plan.

“The implementation of this technology will be made possible by the fibre-optic data communication network we will be installing throughout the development. The alternative energy and energy-saving technology will be built into the town’s infrastructure from the outset which means all owners will enjoy these benefits as standard features.”

80 solar panels on each roof

Mulder said the design of one of the new houses well illustrated this approach “Some 80 solar roof panels will provide the full energy requirements of the house, storing the excess produced in an integrated bank of photovoltaic batteries with the capacity to provide the energy needs of the house for three days. Additional excess can be fed into the town’s own energy grid and be sold be the owner for use elsewhere.

“Rainwater harvested from the roof will be stored in three 1000 litre tanks built into the structure of the house while a unique heat-pump system will circulate pool water through the flooring system to heat or cool the building to reduce seasonal temperature variances.”

Mulder said the fibre-optic technology will serve as infrastructure for a wide range of services, from regulating the town’s energy grid to controlling infra-red security systems and providing high-speed connectivity. “As the telephone system is also imbedded in this technology, all calls within the town will be free.”

Mulder said once the upgraded dairy farm with its stud herd was fully operational and generating profits, it would be ceded, debt-free, to the town. “The town’s people will have access not only to the range of dairy products but also to an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables which will be commercially grown on the property.”

Sourced for ecoAfrica Travel via The Green Times.

She mentions the fact that much of the blame for fracking has thus far been attributed to Shell (seen as the greedy corporate giant) as well as the Department of Mineral Resources. But have we considered that these parties are simply stepping up to fulfil a demand – which starts with us?

In today’s society, we focus on the easiest and most convenient way of living. Which means many people live in a consumerist and materialistic way on the one hand, and yet on the other they demand that companies like Shell focus on protecting the environment. It seems that the responsibility must start with us – through everyday environmental acts and increasing the demand for sustainable energy sources while decreasing the demand that Shell is trying to fill. Simply boycotting Shell is not enough – soon enough the other mining companies will step up to fulfil the increased demand placed upon them.

As van Hoogstraten says, “Do we really expect to be able to indulge our bad habits on the one hand and call for a pristine environment on the other? This is the demand of a petulant child, not a responsible citizen. It may not seem like it, but any intelligent response to fracking has to include a change in the way we live our daily lives.”

Definately a new way of thinking – what are your thoughts? Read the full article – it is very eye opening: click here.

Sourced via All4Women.co.za for ecoAfrica Travel

Deforested slopes under cultivation

A few kilometres outside Lilongwe the contrast could not be starker. Lumbering 4×4′s give way to the dominant mode of transport – bicycles. Bicycles by the thousands, bicycles loaded with towers of wood and charcoal, bicycles as taxis. So while the inexorable rise in the oil price over the longer term has serious consequences for Malawi’s small formal economy as it gets priced out of the world oil market – not to mention for the operations of the 4×4-mounted NGOs et al – 85% of the population who live and sustain themselves in the rural areas could well be less affected by peak oil. However, there is a new indirect and perverse threat as indigenous woodland is replaced with Jatropha, a cash crop for biofuel, in a country already suffering severe and accelerating deforestation and destruction of biodiversity. I’ll return to the issue of deforestation later.

Bicycles everywhere

It is difficult to comprehend how dependent Malawi is on agriculture until you have travelled there (of course we all are ultimately; supermarkets alone are not sufficient – Bartlett’s 16th law of sustainability). Agriculture accounts for a third of GDP and 90% of exports. But dependence on agriculture is more fundamental: almost everybody is a farmer and a subsistence farmer at that. Malawi suffers from an ongoing food security crisis that affects more than five million people in the south of the country. Every scrap of land is cultivated, even the road verges in Lilongwe, to feed a burgeoning population growing at 2.39% annually. No wonder that much of the development aid is targeted at developing agriculture. While I am no agricultural expert it did bother me somewhat that the input of chemical fertiliser, which has as feedstock natural gas, to improve agricultural yields is regarded as one of the major interventions. To my mind this creates a new dependency on an imported resource, which is in any case unsustainable, and over the long term and with injudicious use, destroys the soil.

Bags of charcoal at the roadside

Almost as critical as the food security situation is hunger for basic energy in the rural areas. From simple observation I concluded that the average rural peasant’s day consists of cultivating, collecting and preparing food, and collecting building materials, wood and charcoal. Access to electricity, almost all of it generated by the hydro plants on the Shire River, is limited to the towns and cities and to only 7.9% of the population. Ninety percent (90%) of the country’s energy demand is met by burning wood or charcoal. And the effect of this hunger for biomass can be seen in a landscape denuded of woodland. Rural people are having to travel further and further for wood, and the production and sale of charcoal for cash is a serious problem.

At the same time small, informal brickworks dot the countryside and consume massive amounts of wood. Perhaps there is a perception that a house is only truly a house if it’s built from brick.

In summary there seem to be two drivers of deforestation:

1) energy demand: for cooking, for firing bricks, somebody else’s demand for biofuel crops

2) food cultivation.

As we climbed out of Lilongwe on the flight back to SA, the difference in vegetation cover along the border between Malawi – stripped and cultivated – and Zambia – forested – was stark, a light-dark line of contrast. Between 1990 and 2005 Malawi lost 12.7% of its forest cover. The situation is plainly unsustainable.

Charcoal transporter

Firing bricks with forest

All this got me wondering about development projects that address rural energy needs, deforestation and loss of biodiversity. In my short week in Lilongwe and 500kms of driving to Cape Maclear and back I had seen little or no evidence of rural energy projects, although clearly there must be. And there are – as a cursory Google search will reveal.

The obvious solution to the demand for cooking fuel is solar cooking, and it seems to be getting wide attention and government support. An alternative project involves the production of briquettes from wood and paper waste and other agricultural residues, and another promotes the use and manufacture of clay stoves. Clearly a wide array of technologies, methods and resources are being employed to address the problem of basic energy production.

So, if you want to make a contribution to sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in Malawi, make a contribution to these basic energy projects, especially the solar cooking projects. They need to be scaled up drastically to make a substantive difference. Some links are provided below.

Livestock transport

There are alternative paths too. Africans are resourceful and this young Malawian built a home-made wind turbine to power the family compound from what he had to hand from ideas that he read in a text book. You must watch this remarkable story:

Ralph Pina is ecoAfrica‘s chairman and is currently studying renewable and sustainable energy

References:

Ndirande Nkhuni Biomass Briquette Programme: http://www.undp.org/energy/publications/2001/files_2001a/06_Malawi.pdf

Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi: http://www.escommw.com/distribution.php

Programme for Basic Energy and Conservation in Southern Africa (ProBEC): Malawi: http://www.probec.org/displaysection.php?czacc=&zSelectedSectionID=sec1192918473

The World Fact Book: Malawi: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html

Malawi Deforestation Rates and Related Forestry Statistics: Malawi: http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Malawi.htm

Malawian Food Crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malawi_food_crisis

The Solar Cooking Archive Wiki: Malawi: http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Malawi

In examining my own life, I realized that energy saving bulbs and solar powered water heating is certainly contributing to the international effort to get our act together.  Still, with our terribly hot summers and icy cold winters in the Ceres Valley in South Africa,  our use of energy to cool or heat our homes, simply transcends my minor efforts to act eco-conscious.  And I suspect this is also felt in many places around the world.  So at the beginning of a building process for a new eco mountain cottage on our farm, what can I do to lessen the need to cool or heat that home?  Will the benefits to the people that will live there, add up to the benefits for the environment?  With these questions on my mind, I set out on my eco search.  You will see that my answers are not exclusive to any one area or climate.

During my search I came upon two alternative building methods that seem to be gaining trustworthiness in the building sector.  The one is “Straw Bale Building” and the other is “Sandbag and Timber Pole Building”.  Both appealed to me because they claim to reduce heating costs by up to 75% through natural insulation.  Although I had initial doubts concerning a wolf blowing a straw and stick house to pieces,  I must say I am certainly taking a hard look at using one of these two for the upcoming project.  This article will look at Straw Bale Building and the next one will look at Sandbag and Timber Pole Building.

Straw Bale Building:
This method uses tighlty stacked straw bales as large “bricks” to build just about anything.  All aspects of building remain the same as we have become familiar with in the 20th century (like plumbing, eletrics, roofing, etc.).  The main difference would be found in the design of foundations, the type of wall building material, and the type of render/plaster.  The straw bales are stacked on top of each other like bricks, with holes left open for windows.  It is then covered with chicken wire and plastered for an even finish.  Because it is usually not good to mix materials, gypsum plasters is not always a good idea when brick and cement isn’t used, but instead natural clay or traditional lime plasters are recommended. 

The main pro’s about this building method is that it is a) energy efficient, b) cost effective and c)  is easy to build.  It is claimed that a straw bale building will reduce heating costs by 75% because of the great insulation of the thick straw walls.  It will also cost you R140 000 (?10 000 / $20 000) less if used to replace brick and block for a normal 3 bedroom house.  And ease of building is proved by the fact that people with no previous skills/experience can participate in the straightforward design and construction, which again saves on labour costs.

Its super and affordable insulation qualities can be explained via the next formula:  the K value of  straw in a strawbale is 0,09 W/mK.  This, combined with walls typically over 450mm thick, gives a U value of 0,13W/m²K – which is two or three times lower than contemporary materials.  This also extends to create a fantastic sound insulation barrier (two recording studios in the USA were actually built of strawbales for their sound proofing quality).

In looking deeper at the energy efficiency of straw bale building, it seems that over 50% of all greenhouse gases are produced by the construction industry and transportation associated with it.  Straw, however, takes carbon dioxide and turns it into oxygen during its life cycle.  Coupled with vastly reduced heating requirements, thereby further reducing carbon dioxide emisssion (greenhouse gas) from the burning of fossil fuels, strawbale building can actually cause a net decrease in greenhouse emissions.  Straw is also an annually renewable natural product, grown by photosynthesis, fuelled from the sun.  It means less pressure to use other more environmentally damaging materials. 

But the advantages doesn’t stop at energy efficiency and low costs.  The ambiance in a straw bale house is cosy, calm and peaceful.  This is partly to do with the high level of sound insulation, partly to do with the air quality, and partly with the organic feel – a beautiful nurturing and safe environment to inhabit. 

There is also a growing body of knowledge on the harmful effects of  living longterm with modern materials that give off minute but significant amounts of toxins, the so-called “sick building syndrome”.  Living in a straw bale house protects you from all that.  It is a natural, breathable material with no harmful effects.

With all of these positives I am almost convinced to use this method.  Two questions I have however, is whether the plaster wouldn’t crack quite a lot with such a seemingly non-solid material, and secondly, will such a building last through decades of heavy rain, wind and climate hammering?

If there are knowledgeable people around who would like to convince me, I am quite eager to be told of long lasting success stories.

Lizanne Malherbe holds an MA degree in Environmental Ethics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
She is currently pursuing a PhD in Environmental Design.