Our Green Living Year 2023 – Green Living Centre

We’ve had a terrific year at the Green Living Centre, from the opening of the Inner West Sustainability Hub, to Footprints Ecofestival. See below for some of our favourites.

Also, if you missed the developments of this year’s COP28 agreement, check out the bottom of this blog for a brief review of some of the essentials.

We’d like to thank all our wonderful collaborators, contractors, experts and community members for helping us throughout the year – thank you!

We held a free webinar, Introduction to Bokashi, presented by Compostable Kate, looking at the amazing and innovative approach to breaking down all things organic in your home.
Also, we hosted an in-person presentation delivered in partnership with Climate Change Balmain Rozelle and Ethical Advisors Coop called Banking on Our Future, covering ethical investment and ways your finances can make a big difference.

We celebrated Sustainable House Day with a bus tour in collaboration with Renew Sydney visiting some fantastic sustainable homes in Camperdown, Lewisham and Leichhardt, with interpretive talks from their owners, architects and designers.

To celebrate Youth Week, we ran Eco Adventure for Tweens where we learned all about food forests, permaculture, the fascinating science of compost, and made some seed dumplings.

We established an Energy Efficiency Consultation service with expert Adam Corrigan from Your Energy Friend. The GLC also supported public events on community batteries at Balmain and Leichhardt.

We participated in the Winter Solstice Festival at Pocket City Farms, helping to promote local permaculture and empowering people to grow their own food with seed and plant giveaways.

The launch of the new Inner West Sustainability Hub and our new Education Space was a huge success. Thousands of residents attended the day to learn about the emerging ongoing opportunities to engage with the range of wonderful circular economy focused tenants at the site, like the Village Project’s Re-Place, the Bower and Dress for Success.

Footprints Ecofestival made a glorious, post-pandemic return to celebrate our wonderful sustainability community.

We established our regular bike activations at the Sustainability Hub, with our Back on Your Bike and Bike Maintenance workshops, as well as our free Bike Tune Ups service, with our collaborators, Pedal Set Go.

We hosted our first Toy Swap workshop with Joy of Giving. Over 35 children were able to bring one of their preloved toys, and exchange or swap it for a ‘new’ one!

We hosted a Seasonal Planting Workshop, and a Plant and Seed Swap, to help celebrate Urban Agriculture Month and encourage people to get growing for summer.
We also hosted a Prepare for Summer talk with energy consultant Adam Corrigan.

We finished the year with a flourish of festive wreath-making and a sustainable fashion workshop called Dare to Wear. If you missed these, check out the links below to get your sorted for the festive season:
Questioning Fashion podcast
Make your own Festive Wreath

From the local to global news, held earlier this month, the United Nations Conference for Climate Change (known better as COP28) was held in Dubai, and it was not without controversy.

At its centre was the COP28 president and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO, Sultan Al Jaber, who faced backlash over his comments leading up to the conference, saying there is ‘no science’ to support the phasing out of fossil fuels to combat climate change.

After two weeks of deliberation, the eventual agreement has been criticised for its phrasing to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’, rather than the stronger alternative, ‘phasing out’, that was anticipated by most nations going into the conference. The language chosen is essentially backed by fossil fuel interests.

The silver lining is that this represents the first time in 30 years of these conferences that a reduction in ‘fossil fuels’ (as opposed to ‘emissions’) has been uttered, let alone agreed upon. However, critics are worried that this will not lead to actions that will reach the 1.5°C reduction goal set in the Paris climate agreement.

There were some positive outcomes; more than 150 countries (including Australia) committed to building sustainable agriculture and food systems. Australia also pledged to stop foreign business financing fossil fuel projects on Australian soil.

Read more about the results of COP28 here.