Pizzazz, zest and verve are what Lizzie Rose, Joanne Tola and Kathy Giunta bring to sustainability education at the Macarthur Centre for Sustainable Living (MCSL). The Centre, officially opened only last February, is in the grounds of the Mt Annan Botanical Gardens near Campbelltown, a commuter centre in Sydney's South West.

The inspiration for MCSL came from CERES Environmental Park, in Melbourne, and funding came from federal sources. The Centre took several years to move from inspiration to actuality.

An old dream realised

The opening of the Centre realises the failed dream of Sydney's Common Ground Project of the mid-1990s.

Common Ground consisted of a team of permaculture educators, an architect, community worker, appropriate technologists and others who aimed to set up a CERES-like site somewhere in the city that was accessible by public transport. They progressed as far as looking at potential sites and made a submission to Manly Council for land before complications in obtaining the site with greatest potential bogged down.

Now MCSL provides de-facto realisation of their dream.

A busy program

A glimpse at MCSL's newsletter indicates the breadth of their sustainability education program: food processing and preserving, chook care, water efficiency, sustainable building design, video screenings, courses in sustainable gardening, how to lower your ecological footprint and growing your food organically. To become self-funding, a charge is made for workshops and courses.

MCSL also operates a program of education for schools and there is the start of a community food garden.

A truly efficient building

The Centre's passive solar building is a carbon positive structure with a closed water cycle featuring grey and black water systems and the harvesting of water from the carpark for use in irrigation.

The building is made of bricks formed of sawdust and concrete. The structure is roofed with a sandwich of insulating polystyrene between metal roofing panels that span up to eight metres, minimising structural beams and rafters.

Walls are made of reversed brick veneer with air-cell insulation and the bricks on the inside. The roof is covered with a total of 28 photovoltaic panels that supply the Centre's energy needs and pay back the building's embodied energy by supplying excess power to the grid.

Food a feature of community activity

At the end of the summer growing season, the overabundance of pumpkins in the community garden was turned into soup and other food products in the Centre's kitchen.

MCSL also participated in Earthday with a candlelight evening meal prepared by its volunteer chef and kitchen crew (on Earthday, city lights are turned off for an hour to highlight potential energy saving). 

There's the beginnings of a small permaculture group at the Centre.

It's early days for MCSL, but the future should be promising with the increasing public demand for knowledge of things sustainable.

Download the Summer and Winter editions of the MCSL newsletter, Lettuce Express: http://www.mcsl.org.au/main.html