Pioneers create building blocks of next industrial revolution

I am a fourth-generation Australian. The story of the first two generations of my family in Australia has been told by my aunt Dame Mary Durack, in her book Kings in Grass Castles.

That story told of discovery, hardship, creativity and perseverance in bringing cattle to Western Queensland and to the Kimberley in the north-west of Western Australia. The grasslands their cattle grazed had only recently been discovered by the early European explorers. It proved a very different environment from the lands that they had left. They had much to learn, much to create and many problems to solve.

Like other pioneering families the early Duracks worked within the context of the values of their time. It is easy to criticise and point to the mistakes they made as well as to their achievements.

My uncle Kim Durack was one of the first to recognise some of these mistakes. Trained as an agricultural scientist he saw the environmental degradation that could result from large scale cattle grazing.

In the 1940s he established the Ord River Experimental Station in the Kimberley in an attempt to better understand how the land could be farmed sustainably rather than ‘using up’ the land and moving on to fresh pastures.

I am a structural engineer and my brother Michael Durack is an architect. We have followed different careers from our pioneering ancestors but there are some parallels. Michael studied architecture at the University of Queensland during the heady days of the 1960’s. His passion has been to challenge the frontiers and extend the boundaries of his profession.

Conventional building construction has achieved much but has also made mistakes.

My uncle Kim recognised the unsustainable nature of some agricultural practices 50 years ago. It is only in recent years that the unsustainable nature of building construction has been recognised.

When I decided to study engineering I shared some of the idealism of 1960s. I wanted not only to make a good living but also to contribute to developments that would enhance quality of life.

It was with some disappointment that I found a profession that was largely a service industry to ‘big business’. The priority was short-term financial return on investment. I am proud to say that this is now changing.

But buildings are still made from virgin natural resources cut from forests and extracted from mines. When a building is demolished the ‘used up’ materials are dumped as landfill. This process is not sustainable. Like the grasslands that my forefathers used up, there is a limit to what we can take from the environment and to how much ‘rubbish’ we can dump.

The book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken et al has been hailed by Bill Clinton among others as a rational basis for sustainable development. It supports the acknowledged importance of ‘triple bottom line’ accounting and marketing that measures and judges a company’s social and environmental performance alongside its financial performance.

In a broader sense, co-author Amory Lovins charts a path towards ‘the next industrial revolution’ and an exciting, optimistic and sustainable future.

The last industrial revolution was focussed on solving an 18th century problem: the inefficiency of labour to produce enough goods for a growing population. Without machines, human labour was inefficient and there were not enough people to produce the products to support the rising expectations of a growing population.

Industrial mechanisation solved this problem by fantastically increasing the productivity of labour. With industrial mechanisation, what took 200 cottage industry workers in 1770, could be done by one spinner in the British textile industry by 1812.

Minimisation of labour is no longer the priority. We must now learn to be less dependent on extractive industries. The next industrial revolution, Lovins argues must focus on dramatic improvements in resource efficiency. My brother and I are directors of a company that manufactures hollow concrete blocks using a radically new process invented and developed by us.

Ultimate Masonry Australia operates in the brave new world of the next industrial revolution where the priority is to lift resource efficiency by margins similar to those achieved with labour efficiency in the last industrial revolution.

To date we have achieved a six-fold increase in resource productivity. A conventional concrete block uses 15 kg of virgin materials – the block we have developed uses a sixth of that. Half of our block is microscopic bubbles of air making it 40% lighter than a conventional block. The remainder of our block is a fine powdered waste mineral called ‘flyash’. Australian coal fired power stations dump 9 million tonnes a year as landfill.

There is plenty of flyash to produce enough blocks for all brick and concrete masonry construction in Australia and the world.

Like our pioneering ancestors, our journey has been one of discovery, hardship, creativity and perseverance. We have had much to learn and many problems to solve.

The world of ‘the next industrial revolution’ is perhaps not as foreign as the outback was to my Irish ancestors but it has had its challenges and surprises.