Profile - Alexander Rd, Raumati Beach

Getting to know the neighbours and become more self-sufficient are key goals of the Alexander Road entry in the Greenest Street competition.

Many of the 15 households at the end of the Raumati Beach street already have vegetable gardens and fruit trees, some have chickens, two have tank and bore water and one household has solar power.

The mixed demographic of retired, middle-aged and young families have lived in Alexander Road between six months to 13 years. One of the renting families wants to know how to ‘travel lightly’ - how to move in and out of a community and still create a green environment without investing too much.

Other goals are getting to know their current carbon footprint and how to reduce it, learning from others, making the vege garden more productive, reducing power consumption, helping children make good choices, insulating and finding out what small daily changes make a difference.

View the Alexander Road blogspot here.

Environmental Footprinting

Footprinting is a way of measuring our individual environmental impact and expresses it as 'Earths' - the number of planet Earths needed if all the world's population used the same resources.

The average individual environmental footprint for the Alexander Rd team is displayed below.  They have nine months to work with their neighbours to reduce it.

= 3.4 Earths (as at January 2012)

Learn more about footprinting here.