Small changes that feel good and add up, at home, in the garden and on the way out the door.
Innovations
In the Fassifern Valley, two machines are picking weeds out of carrot and onion rows one plant at a time, one with a tiny targeted spray, the other with light alone. Growers designed the trials themselves.
Logan City Council is using drones to start the small, careful burns that clear dry fuel from its reserves. In backyards nearby, people are doing their own version with a rake, a ladder and a neighbour.
In August we met the Melbourne inventor retiring the shiny paper docket. This week his team made it even simpler: see a QR at the checkout, scan it, and the receipt is yours.
When Planet Ark held the first National Recycling Week in 1996, Australia recycled about seven per cent of what it threw away. Thirty years on the figure is over sixty, and next week the campaign asks every household for one better habit.
Havenwoods is a state forest inside the city of Milwaukee. On 17 October it opened a short looped trail where the forest's story is told in braille, sound and things you can touch, with white canes at the door for anyone who needs one.
A swing under the shade, a cubby built by tireless parents, a tall pine that leads a child home from an adventure. Trees give more than we notice, and this year whole towns said thank you to theirs.
It started at Bondi in 2010 with a hand painted sign that said don't dump it, sell it. Sixteen years and 7.2 million second hand treasures later, the Garage Sale Trail is running its last two weekends under the people who built it, and looking for someone to carry it on.
Sit in your favourite outdoor spot for twenty minutes, write down the birds you see, and press submit. That is the whole job, and last year nearly 64,000 people did it and counted more than five million birds.
We caught the train up the coast on a spring Sunday for Woytopia, the free sustainable living festival the Peninsula Environment Group has run with volunteers since 2008. Here is the day as we lived it, from the first plate to the last tree.
Schulz Organic Dairy in Timboon has sold milk in returnable glass since 2017, and from July its bottle is made in South Australia instead of shipped in from overseas.
That smell when rain lands on warm ground has a name, an Australian one, and behind it is a partnership between soil bacteria and tiny creatures that is 400 million years old.
Tucson, Arizona had 112 days over 38 degrees in 2024. Its answer is a million trees by 2030, native species chosen for birds and pollinators as much as shade, and up to three free trees for any household on the streets that need them most.
