National Interest

Forget the panama-hat wearing, McMansion building impresarios: peer-group pressure may soon force the white-shoe brigade to change its footwear. For example, Gold Coast property developer Bruce Mitchell is embracing the colour green, claiming to have built Australia's first carbon-neutral industrial estate, capable of supplying its own water and power needs. Yet surprisingly, he says finding the right technology for the job wasn't a problem but getting banks to give him financial backing was. Apparently, the big financial institutions found all of these new-fangled solar panels and water-tanks a bit too wacky. But here's the interesting part: savings in the running cost of the development are enough to cover any additional outlay in getting the development up and running. Can carbon-neutral be cost-neutral as well?

Transcript

Peter Mares: Gold Coast property developers don't generally have a reputation for environmental sensitivity. The stereotype is of a rapacious white-shoe brigade out to turn a quick buck - regardless of the consequences.

But perhaps that image is a bit dated.

Bruce Mitchell is a Gold Coast developer and he claims to have built Australia's first, environmentally sustainable industrial park, which supplies all of its own water and much of its own power.

Bruce Mitchell joins me from his office at Coomera Shores on the Gold Coast. Bruce Mitchell, welcome to The National Interest.

Bruce Mitchell: Yes, good afternoon.

Peter Mares: There are several things that set your development apart from most industrial estates, so I want to look at them in turn. Firstly, water. You plan to be entirely self-sufficient for water and not to draw at all on the mains supply.

Bruce Mitchell: The factories themselves are totally self-sufficient within the estate.

Peter Mares: And how do you achieve that?

Bruce Mitchell: I've put a numerous amount of 45,000-litre tanks underground. All the water off the roofs go through first a flush system then into the tanks, then from there into a filtering system that was approved by the Council. We have enough water to last us for about four months - and keep in mind, Peter, we've finished Stage 1. I'm just in the throes of starting Stage 2 on the estate.

Peter Mares: And what - there'll be more water storage on Stage 2?

Bruce Mitchell: Yes. There's one thing: I've put a 4-million litre dam in and another 1-million litre dam on the site - that's purely for the environment. I haven't used that water. I had intended to use it for fire services, but the fire services were going to shut me down if I tried to use the lake, so they demanded I connect to the mains purely for the fire service, which I had to do.

Peter Mares: So, it's the only reason you're connected to the mains: because the fire services required that.

Bruce Mitchell: Yes. My Stage 2, I've bought a 575,000 litre tank and that will take up 300,000 for the sprinkling system in the one-acre shed, and the remaining amount of water that will come off the roofs will be just a back-up pool. I'll end up with totally 7, 45,000-litre underground tanks.

Peter Mares: I think you're obviously catching water off the roofs of the sheds on the estate. But I think you're also capturing water that falls on roadways, and so on.

Bruce Mitchell: Yes. With the road system I've harvested all the water off the roads. Currently, there are two gross pollutant traps in the system.

Peter Mares: So, that's to filter out any sort of rubbish that may be...

Bruce Mitchell: Yes, it doesn't get the hard metals, but it gets rubbish out of it. It then goes into a wetland area... It's like a certain amount of land set aside and we put 800ml of gravel, 1.5 metres down the ground. We've just put large boulders around up to about three-quarters of a metre high, then we cover it with a mat, a bio-filter mat, and then we put down sand and some soil to the specifications required. And I've built sort of a creek system to filter into the wetlands, so that it looks as though it's natural. When it goes into there, it's then polished and the water runs into the lakes.

Peter Mares: So, you've got your own micro environment there, then, with running creeks and dams and so on. Does that mean you're encouraging a bit of wildlife on this industrial estate?

Bruce Mitchell: Oh yes. We've even got shrimps in the dam, which is quite unique.

Peter Mares: What about the other end of the water system? I'm thinking waste disposal, sewage and other waste. How do you deal with that?

Bruce Mitchell: We've got two systems. One being a Biolytix System. It takes quite a bit of waste. That system won the Invention of the Year Award with the ABC Inventors program in 2003 or 2004. The Biolytix System copes with quite a substantial amount of waste. All of my tenants are required to be sustainable in their discharge of any waste. The Biolytix System is computerised and it's connected to a landline, back to a base, and we've never ever had a call-out, it's never failed. And the Biolytix System works with the worms inside, it's odour-free. Completely no smell.

Peter Mares: So, again, it's all self-contained, all managed on site, no need to connect into the local system.

Bruce Mitchell: None at all.

Peter Mares: Now, let's turn to electricity. I presume you've got solar panels on the roof. Is that going to supply all the power needs?

Bruce Mitchell: No. That supplies all of what I'd call the property needs for all the street lighting, all the pumps, the building systems. I have several pumps in the system because I take the water out of the dams and move it around the property, so it puts oxygen into the system and gets back and keeps the lakes free of any mosquito larvae, because of the enormous amount of fish in the dams. So, we're mozzie free. And so, all those pumps are driven by solar power. That's grid-connected. We're in the process of checking it every month to see where we are, we've got to put more panels on. At the moment we look like we're neutral and I'll just keep adding them until I get them done. The company called Solar Green is monitoring that.

Peter Mares: But when you have tenants move in and they start powering up equipment, I presume some of that will require three-phase power. I guess you're not going to be able to power all that.

Bruce Mitchell: We're not promoting that. When I say our site's carbon-free, my site as a whole as an imprint or a footprint on the site, we're carbon neutral. With the tenants they've got... I've gone to a lot of trouble to maintain their needs of electricity to a minimum. I've installed what are called thermal-mass walls for the entire lengths of the sheds. That means the shed is built up to the ground level and we've built the ground behind it, using retaining walls, and that's about an average of 2.5 metres in height. So, our southern walls are completely thermal-massed to keep the sheds cool.

Peter Mares: So, essentially, you've used all the possible design techniques and so on to keep your heating and cooling costs down and all the rest of it, to minimise power use.

Bruce Mitchell: Absolutely. All our western walls are fully insulated. We use a product called Ultra Panel on the walls instead of slab. We've faced all our sheds north with big canopies, we ventilate them...

Peter Mares: And even your buildings themselves are recycled. I think you've disassembled sheds elsewhere and moved them to the site and built them again.

Bruce Mitchell: Yes. I've searched all around Australia. The first one I wanted was 2,000 square metres - it's got two gantriess run through it. It was built 48 years ago, it came our of Nanawading in Victoria; a beautiful shed, it's got over 10,000 bolts, it's almost built like the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Peter Mares: And did that cost extra to move a shed from Nanawading in Victoria - which is a Melbourne suburb - all the way up to the Gold Coast? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to buy new materials?

Bruce Mitchell: No. I've done a cross-comparison. The cost of the two gantries alone that run through the length of the sheds, this particular shed, I got those free and I was able to end up... it ended up getting cheaper, as if I had bought a new one. And you've got to keep in mind, Peter, that a shed that's got a gantry running through it has to be built from a different design than a typical shed.

Peter Mares: What about the costs overall, though? Has this cost a lot more than it would have cost you to set up a bog-ordinary industrial estate in the same place?

Bruce Mitchell: I've put an enormous amount of energy and time myself into this estate. If you took into consideration I think it would be breaking about even. One of the big wins I had, I got hold of a one-acre shed, it was 4,000 square metres, I got that out of Port Brisbane, and that's got a roof height of 11.8 metres and that is the key to the whole exercise. It's amazing. Every time I wanted a shed, it just seemed to appear on the horizon, and everything's fitted, like as though it had been pre-planned.

Peter Mares: I guess what I'm getting at, though, is are you primarily motivated by environmental concerns or do you see this as very much a business proposition, see it in economic terms?

Bruce Mitchell: Well, I'm in a retired state and I've got other interests, and I did this... I sold my residential estate to buy this one, or residential property to buy this one for the purpose of developing an industrial estate that was all my own history of my life all put together and I've been able to do this estate purely on an emotional state... It was a passion rather than financial...

Peter Mares: And I think the technology's been easy but the banks have been difficult.

Bruce Mitchell: Oh, well, I've gone ahead of my time in the sense of one of the problems I had... I had one tenant who only wanted Shed 3, and he grew out of that and wanted Shed 2, and he grew out of that and wanted Shed 1. Before I knew what was going on, in a sense, I had one tenant leasing three sheds - a large packaging company, creating packaging, and they rang me up and said, 'Bruce, we want the next one, that's that large one', but my Council approval wasn't there. So they left me with three empty sheds. The bank got a bit nervous.

Peter Mares: You've solved all those problems now, I think.

Bruce Mitchell: Yes. I went out and I just off on the bike and away I went, without an agent's help. The agents were just running around, didn't find anybody, I found three tenants overnight, almost. I had the new tenants moving in before Creative Packaging moved out.

Peter Mares: Well, Bruce Mitchell, thank you very much for speaking to us in the National Interest.

Bruce Mitchell: Thank you.

Peter Mares: Gold Coast property developer, Bruce Mitchell. And if you'd like to share your views on Green building, then ring the National Interest feedback line on 1300 936 222, or click the 'Have Your Say' button at the top of this page.

Guests

Bruce Mitchell
Gold Coast property developer

Presenter

Peter Mares

Producer

James Panichi

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