Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows an excerpt from Eco House Challenge in which the Shepherd family is challenged to cut down on its car usage and the Edwards family tries to reduce its energy consumption to meet the ‘energy hot spot challenge’. Host Glenn Hall takes the wheel clamps off the Shepherds’s car but says they must limit its use to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent. At the Edwards’s home, ‘eco coach’ Tanya Ha shows the family a breakdown of their energy use and then tests their appliances to identify which are the energy ‘guzzlers’.

Educational value points

• Eco House Challenge addresses the issue of global warming, which is caused by human activity that involves burning fossil fuels such as petrol, gas and oil. This has led to an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. Per capita, Australia is among the worst greenhouse polluters, partly because of a reliance on coal-burning power plants, which in 2005 generated 78 per cent of electricity used in Australia.

• The use of energy in the home, which increased by 52 per cent between 1983 and 2004, is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from Australian households, producing about 8 tonnes of emissions each year per household, and this is why the Edwards are being set the energy challenge. About half the energy households use comes from electricity.

• On average, Australian households each generate 6 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year from transport use, with car travel accounting for most of these emissions, which is why the Shepherds are challenged to cut their car usage. Cars carrying an average of 1.2 people are used on 80 per cent of trips to places such as work, school or shops, yet saving a litre of petrol by walking, catching public transport or using a fuel-efficient car cuts emissions by 2.8 kg.

• Australian households generate about 20 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions through everyday activities such as electricity use, transport and the production of household waste that decays in landfills. The average household of three people produces about 15 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year – however, this figure is higher for larger families such as the Edwards and the Shepherds, and also increases along with affluence and home size.

• While the amount of energy used by whitegoods and other electrical appliances such as those shown here depends on their number, frequency of use and energy efficiency, on average they represent 30 per cent of household energy use. The increasing affluence of Australian households has seen a rise in the use of whitegoods, described in this clip as energy ‘guzzlers’. An energy efficiency rating system has been progressively introduced in Australia from 1986.

• Eco House Challenge is an example of reality television, a genre that is largely unscripted, documents actual events and features ‘ordinary people’ such as the Edwards and Shepherds rather than actors. It differs from documentary in that participants are usually positioned as contestants who, like the two families here, are put in extreme situations and set challenges. Like fly-on-the-wall documentaries, it observes and records the daily activities of participants.