Carbon Neutral City Leadership

City of Fremantle, which has become the sustainability capital of Western Australia, sees carbon neutrality as a leadership opportunity, reducing energy use and increasing efficiency by engaging the community, in the process constructing the largest solar farm in the state, to put 30 kilowatts into its leisure centre.

By Aaron Fernandes in Science Western Australia (7 October 2009)::

THE City of Fremantle is set to become the sustainability capital of Western Australia with the recent launch of the state’s first carbon neutral council.

For over a decade Fremantle council has been making incremental reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of its corporate operations, and in March of this year resolved to become 100 percent carbon neutral.

Less than 4 months later the target has been achieved and on Thursday October 1, locals gathered at Victoria Hall in Fremantle to celebrate the landmark achievement.

City of Fremantle Sustainability Officer Alex Hyndman says the first step was making an accurate assessment of the city’s carbon emissions.

“The first thing we did, we calculated a really precise understanding of our carbon footprint, including many things that are often overlooked.

“For example, every time we send something to landfill that creates methane, which we made sure to include in our total, something that many other organisations wouldn’t.”

Mr Hyndman says in 2007 and 2008 the City of Fremantle totaled its carbon emissions at approximately 5600 tonnes, and immediately sought to reduce its footprint.

“We started the CAT bus, installed pool blankets at the Leisure centre to preserve the temperature in the heated pools and removed ten cars from our light fleet. We also updated our IT equipment on efficiency standards and have just constructed the largest solar farm in the state, putting a 30 kilowatt solar farm at our leisure centre.

“The next step was to switch our energy sources, so we switched 100 percent of our energy over from general grid power to green power, signing up to Synergy’s natural power product and that reduced our footprint by 55 percent.”

Mr Hyndman says part of the resolution of the council was to treat carbon neutrality as a leadership opportunity, reducing energy use and increasing efficiency by engaging the community.

“We have staked a leadership position and we’re the first local government in the state to do so but that is not the end of it – we have to keep going back and identifying new ways to reduce our energy use.

“The last step for us is to offset anything that we can’t reduce. We are using greenhouse-friendly certified offsets audited by the federal government. We’re offsetting 45 percent of our emissions.”

The launch featured presentations from representatives of solar and wave power, organic wine, local native plants, free bike sharing and Living Smart.

Source: www.sciencewa.net.au