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Connecting people, places and plants with JUNGLEFY
125 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to episode 060 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality.
I’m your host Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico wellness real estate and in this episode I’m in Australia talking to Suzie Barnett, CEO of Junglefy, a full service living infrastructure specialist focused on bringing more plants into our cities.
The company began life as a landscaping business and evolved over the last 13 years into one of the world’s leading green wall, green roof and urban greenery businesses.
We discuss the all-important ‘why’ behind integrating this type of abundant greenery into a building or public space; their involvement in scientific research studies quantifying Return On Investment on indoor breathing walls in terms of productivity, feelings of wellbeing and improvements in air quality; why it’s so important to consider upfront not just the initial investment cost on a living wall system, irrigation and lighting as well as ongoing maintenance; their ideas for sharing outdoor living facade maintenance costs with local councils in reflection of their community benefits and the outputs of their tech-enabled product development process in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney.
Suzie is on the Board of the Living Future Institute of Australia, Chair of the Biophilic Design Initiative and was pivotal in establishing the Green Building Council of Australia. She’s an industry powerhouse in other words and this conversation didn’t disappoint.
GUEST / SUZIE BARNETT
- https://www.junglefy.com.au/
- https://www.instagram.com/junglefyourcities/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/junglefy-pty-ltd/
HOST / MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 60
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to episode 60 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder by Filico Wellness Real
Interview with Susie Barnett on Urban Greening
00:00:25
Speaker
Estate. And in this episode, I'm in Australia talking to Susie Barnett, CEO of JungleFi, a full-service living infrastructure specialist focused on bringing more plants into our cities.
00:00:38
Speaker
The company began life as a landscaping business and evolved over the last 13 years or so into one of what I'd class as the world's leading green wall, green roof and urban greenery businesses.
Benefits and Challenges of Integrating Greenery
00:00:51
Speaker
Susie and I discuss the all-important why behind integrating this type of greenery into a building or public space. Their involvement in scientific research studies quantifying return on investment for indoor breathing walls. There we look at things like productivity, feelings of wellbeing and improvements in air quality in particular. We discuss why it's so important to consider upfront, not just the initial investment costs on a living wall system and its irrigation and lighting, but also its ongoing maintenance.
00:01:20
Speaker
We look at their ideas for sharing outdoor living facade maintenance costs with local councils and reflection of the community benefits they bring and the outputs of their tech-friendly product development process in collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney.
00:01:36
Speaker
Susie is on the board of the Living Future Institute of Australia. She's chair of the Biophilic Design Initiative and was pivotal in establishing the Green Building Council of Australia. She's an industry powerhouse, in other words, and this conversation didn't disappoint. So without further ado, here she is, Susie Barnett from JungleFi.
Evolution and Purpose of JungleFi
00:02:00
Speaker
Susie, lovely to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Lovely to be here, Matt.
00:02:05
Speaker
Could you start by giving us a quick intro to the Jungle Fire as a business and perhaps I'll be particularly interested in understanding about if its products and services have evolved over the years or if really it's set out with it with a task and knew what it was doing from day one or if it's been more of a sort of a testing the market as you've gone.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, Junglify, we're all about, well, our main purpose is to cultivate that critical connection between people, places and plants. And we are a full service organization, so we grow the plants, we consult with, you know, early, very early on in the design process of the built environment to make sure we can give them our
00:02:51
Speaker
you know, the latest information on how these, um, these products should be installed and also maintained. And then we do the installation and the maintenance. And so, and it, and it keeps going around our systems, uh, a modular. And so that gives our clients an opportunity to keep, I guess, have a much longer life, um, for the plants, um, than other systems. Has it always been that way?
00:03:18
Speaker
No, we started out life 13 years ago as a landscaping business. But we had a lot of people asking for these things called Greenwalls. And what happened was the owners decided to start a sister business called Jungle Fire. They named it Jungle Fire. And they had both businesses running at the same time, the landscaping business and the Greenwall business. And the Greenwall business was
00:03:47
Speaker
the thing that excited them the most and they saw the future in the market and they decided to close down the landscaping business and purely focus on green walls, which has evolved a lot over the last 13 years. So it's evolved to
00:04:04
Speaker
look at roofs and facades and different types of products fit for purpose, depending on the opportunity and what the clients are looking for.
Design Process and Client Motivation
00:04:15
Speaker
And where it's evolving now is at the beginning, Jungle Fire was very much involved in the latter stages of the project. So we would get involved once the design had been done, it had already been contracted out to a builder, and then they go, oh, it's landscaping. Oh, who can just do this?
00:04:33
Speaker
So it's very, very hard at that time to get the best outcomes in those early days because you're at the very end of the process. Today, it's very different. We get involved at the very beginning of the process before they've even conceptualized what they want. And clients come to us and say,
00:04:53
Speaker
What's possible? What can we do? And what's even more encouraging over the last couple of years is they're also thinking longer term. How can we design this for the longer term as opposed to that aesthetic? It's going to look good on day one. And then after year one, year two, year three, you know, it starts to
00:05:13
Speaker
to degrade, whereas we design it to look good at year one, year five, year ten, you know, well into perpetuity. And I think that's probably the biggest evolution of what we do. And when you
00:05:31
Speaker
Try to understand the key drivers then behind your client's decisions to start working with you or to sort of come up with the initial concept. Well, we need to bring some of the outside world in with some greenery, with some indoor landscaping, possibly a green wall. They contact you. Do you sense that it is about delivering some kind of a tangible ROI? Do they come with numbers that they're trying to hit? Is it about expressing company values and beliefs or is it just an aesthetic decision that they make?
00:06:01
Speaker
It's a combination of all of those things. And again, this has evolved a lot in recent years. So originally, and still to some degree, some people are very much driven by just the aesthetic of plants. They look amazing. People love them. But they don't really understand the deeper purpose of plants and why people love them. And I think that's what's starting to be understood in the market.
Scientific Research and Economic Benefits
00:06:30
Speaker
So plants look good but they have a very strong purpose in that they connect people to that place and they connect us with nature which is fundamentally one of the most critical things we can have in our built environments because they have been designed really for, I call it for domination, you know, they're engineered and they're designed in a way for us as humans to dominate nature and what we're now seeing is
00:06:59
Speaker
an opportunity to rethink that and look at how we can design and build with nature at the forefront so it's inclusive.
00:07:10
Speaker
Are they still being driven by return on investment? Absolutely. But what we're seeing is a very strong return on investment for those who do include plants in the right way for fit for purpose and for longevity. So much so that we actually, a couple of years ago, we actually commissioned an organization called the Centre for International Economics.
00:07:38
Speaker
They are people who take data and convert it into dollar terms.
00:07:44
Speaker
And this is something that normally only governments ask for because they're spending taxpayers' dollars. So they use organizations like the Center for International Economics to tell them, if we spent $5 billion on this infrastructure project, are we going to get a good return on that? So we ask them, what would that look like using our scientific data for our return on investment?
00:08:11
Speaker
for a particular product that we have called our Breathing Technology, which is an activated green wall, essentially, Matt. And they told us that the return on investment, if you installed a breathing wall inside, would be $3. If you spent $1, you would get $3.44 in return because of the productivity gains and the response that people have to having plants and nature.
00:08:38
Speaker
inside because they're very active at cleaning the air, removing nasty pollutants, such as CO2 particulate matter, VOCs. And because of that biophilic response that we have with nature. If you put a breathing wall externally, the CAE report told us that you'd get $1.95 in return.
00:08:59
Speaker
And these are big numbers. These are return on investment numbers that we know the market needs because what we're doing is still challenging the industry. It's still considered quite niche and quite new, even though we've been doing it for 13 years and other companies around the world. But property and the property sector is very much a
00:09:23
Speaker
a very price driven sector. And we have to convert that feel good notion of plants making people happy into real dollar terms. And I think that's where we're at now. And we're starting to see that driving decision making now beyond just it being an aesthetic
00:09:44
Speaker
we're finding the scientific research we do is driving that as well. So developers and owners want to be able to provide a strong business case to get the funding or to convince the COO entire economic times, it all comes down to dollars. So the combination of scientific research and economics is definitely driving decisions now.
00:10:14
Speaker
I'm a big fan of anyone who's making a contribution on the research side. I think it's so important. And there is more and more data out there, but there's almost seemingly never enough. So it's always a good idea if one can squeeze it into a project somehow, then
00:10:28
Speaker
Exactly. It's quite frustrating because the science on plants and our relationship to them is probably the largest global body of evidence you will see on anything. And yet people still question its value. And so it is frustrating, but it's starting to resonate. I feel optimistic that this information is starting to hit the market and the early adopters are certainly using it to their advantage.
00:10:56
Speaker
I know one of the comments that I often hear or one of the questions from a client will be, okay, great, it's going to cost X to get this set up. Let's call it sort of the capex, the upfront investment in installing a wall indoors or out. And then quickly,
00:11:12
Speaker
It's followed up by so and what about ongoing costs what we got a factory in in terms of maintenance and then really that flips in the sort of opex. I'm operating overhead related to maintaining it cuz you want it to look good you want to know you don't really want that plants on the wall that kind of needs to look fresh so from your experience now.
00:11:31
Speaker
When would a living wall be a sensible choice? And in what circumstances could it perhaps be avoided or replaced with an alternative? There must be some instances where you just have to be honest with the client. So, okay, look, this is gonna be a challenging space, whereas presumably there are others where it's just, it's a gift, right? There are some walls or spaces in terms of light where it's an obvious win, and there must be some where you just go, whoa, okay, this is maybe too tough. It would be interesting to hear a bit of both, right?
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, of course, absolutely. You're absolutely right. And it's, you know, for us, it's as much as what you say no to is what you say yes to, because for us as a business, every single plant we install is our brochure in the future. And even and it's not just ours, it's a whole industry, because we're leaders in the industry.
Technical and Financial Considerations
00:12:23
Speaker
So
00:12:23
Speaker
If you, every failure of a green wall is someone's reason not to do it in the future. So, and I think this, you know, the OPEX, CAPEX is definitely a barrier for adoption because
00:12:37
Speaker
you've got different decision makers and different budgets. And what a developer will want to do and then contract us and a builder to actually put in, they're not necessarily paying for the maintenance in the future. So whatever decisions they make, if they make poor decisions on lighting, if they under-invest in lighting, if they don't invest in the right fit for purpose living world system,
00:13:05
Speaker
Then they're not the ones paying for it down the track It's going to be the the future owner facility manager tenants strata you name it so that is certainly one of the biggest challenges the way we've certainly said no to projects when they have not wanted to invest in the correct lighting system or irrigation system and
00:13:28
Speaker
We don't tend to put, I mean, they're basic needs for us. If they don't want to do the right lighting or any lighting or irrigation, we tend to say no, because we're also the company that's maintaining it. And our head of maintenance is someone who, we don't want to create more problems in the future. We only want to create a really good solution.
00:13:50
Speaker
The way around that really comes down to education and making sure that those who are making those early decisions are aware that they're making decisions on behalf of others in the future and they're
00:14:04
Speaker
need to make the right decisions. And I think for a company like Jungle Fire, because we have done this so many times and we have so much experience, we are in a position to walk away if we don't feel like they make the right decision. That's fascinating how many people, how many of those companies come back when they realize, you know, this is what we really want and we appreciate. They want that kind of advice.
00:14:28
Speaker
So I think in the future or for anyone out there thinking about this, the advice I would give is do not think that this is a set and forget kind of decision. You can't say, yes, I want plants. I want them to look pretty on day one. You must be thinking longer term because this is the benefits of the plants are totally outweigh any of the costs. As I just said, you know, that's one example. The Center for International Economics has already
00:14:55
Speaker
told us that for one of our product lines.
00:14:59
Speaker
I think clients need to think, so they need to think long-term, they need to understand what is going to make this particular installation successful in the future. And it's no different to making other decisions in your building for future maintenance. They're always thinking about how much will it cost to maintain this building in the future. I think the difference with the plants is there is a perceived higher cost
00:15:29
Speaker
And I've seen this before in the industry. I spent over a decade working with the Green Building Council of Australia, and they facilitate and manage the environmental rating system Green Star, which is equivalent to LEED or BRIAM globally. And Green Star had a perceived cost. We can't do it. It's going to cost too much. And we're seeing the same now for looking at any kind of living infrastructure or nature-based solution.
00:15:59
Speaker
And I think what's gonna happen is we just need to keep educating the market and make them see that the cost is actually an investment. And what you get from that investment is more benefit than financial investment. And clients must think about, definitely you've mentioned them, lighting, accessibility, how will it be accessed in the future if it's in a really hard to access
00:16:24
Speaker
place so you can't get to it on an EWP, ladder, ropes.
00:16:31
Speaker
access, then the plants will eventually fail because they do need to be looked after, just like us. So access and future maintenance is a really important. Plant selection is absolutely critical. It's all, again, it's all about the light and it's all about what types of plants will survive on a inside, on a north facade, on an east facade, on a west facade, you know,
00:16:59
Speaker
plants are pretty predictable actually when it comes to which plants can survive in those environments and they have to see that regular maintenance is actually an investment that saves money over time. The analogy I use Matt is
00:17:15
Speaker
No one buys a car thinking that the day they hand over the money and buy that, they never have to do anything to that car ever again. In fact, they know that they will have to get it serviced regularly. And if they do, they will get a lot more out of the life of that vehicle than if they did nothing and just drove it into the ground. Our products are exactly the same, except that the plants are living and they can be replaced quite easily. But it's not a set and forget type opportunity.
00:17:45
Speaker
We have to think outside the box there.
00:17:50
Speaker
that we're starting to talk to people about is this idea of sharing the investment in maintenance, particularly for exterior applications. So when you think about it, a lot of our local councils, you know, they plant the trees in our streets, they maintain them, they look after them, and they do it for the benefit of the community because we know the trees are
00:18:17
Speaker
They're creating biodiversity habitats, they're cooling temperatures down.
00:18:22
Speaker
They're cleaning the air to some degree, and they look amazing. A leafy street is what adds value to any property. We know that. So what we're finding fascinating in our conversations of late is why aren't living facades considered the same way? Because they are also giving an enormous benefit to the community, not just to the users of that particular building. But at the moment, the maintenance costs are
00:18:51
Speaker
upon the owners of the building.
Innovations and Transformative Effects
00:18:55
Speaker
And there's no shared investment there. And I see a future where potentially there may be a contribution by local councils or other government departments, because the benefit of those plants on facades, whether it's a green wall, a breathing wall, a green facade, is community-wide.
00:19:19
Speaker
not just to the benefit of the users of that building. So effectively a public-private partnership for the ongoing costs. Exactly, exactly. Makes sense. So it's interesting because you've got concept, design, plant selection, installation, ongoing maintenance, but there's also this piece at the front end around the technical
00:19:43
Speaker
components, so the actual sort of engineering of the product itself. Not every company out there does this. And I find it to be one of your sort of USPs in a way that you have gone down the path of developing and trying to create your own innovations in this space over recent years. All around the idea of sort of unlocking the power of nature in the built environment, right? But there's the breathing wall that you mentioned. I saw on your website something called the X frame.
00:20:13
Speaker
Give us a quick overview of some of these components that are effectively your IP, right? You develop them and then you use them yourself. 100%. So we have taken our knowledge, our 13 years of experience, and we've invested a lot in research and development around products and our research partnerships with plant scientists at the University of Technology. Sydney has also helped us to evolve our products from a
00:20:41
Speaker
very much a scientific and an engineering perspective. So unlike other living wall applications, we're not just putting plants in a pot and whacking on a wall and hoping for the best. We've actually delved deep into the science and the engineering behind how that plant will survive long-term. So the first innovation that we came up with was our module itself.
00:21:07
Speaker
It's a square module. We purpose grow the plants into that module so that when they're installed on site, they're already grown in and established and will last longer. They don't go into shock.
00:21:23
Speaker
because they're already established. And the X-Frame is our system of installing that on site. So you literally, I actually love seeing the X-Frames once they're installed. They look like a beautiful piece of industrial design. And then we wait, so we do that on the project. And then whilst the building is undergoing other forms of construction, the plants are always the things, Matt, that go in last. Because once the plants are there,
00:21:49
Speaker
they need looking after. So we do all of our work up to a point which allows us to install it in the schedule and timeframe of that construction project and then we wait until the project's sort of at the very last days which is usually the highest stress point but then the plants come in and what's always amazing to me is once the plants are in people on that site
00:22:13
Speaker
just stop and go, wow, how amazing is that? Whereas up to that point, they're a little bit like, what are you doing? What is this all about? And it's not till they see the plants that they realize how impactful it is. And it's literally a matter of a day. The plants are not there. And then they're there because of our engineering with the module and the X-ray.
00:22:34
Speaker
We're also able to apply that into much larger infrastructure examples. So our latest innovation is we've taken our standard module and X frame and we've put multiple, sometimes eight, sometimes 10 on what we call a mega module. And it's going at the moment we're installing our mega modules on
00:22:59
Speaker
On quite a controversial project in Sydney, there are ventilation shafts as part of an underground tunneling project called the WestConnex.
00:23:09
Speaker
This is a piece of functional infrastructure that sadly we need in our cities at the moment because we are still driving around in cars. And what the government decided to do was actually cover those ventilation shafts with plants. And we came up with our mega module concept, which means they literally get craned on, already planted, already installed, and they're there within minutes after they've been craned and installed onto these.
00:23:38
Speaker
very, very high ventilation shafts and now they're there creating an amazing opportunity for biodiversity to establish themselves and connect to the ventilation shafts with the parklands that are surrounding it.
00:23:51
Speaker
So that's another innovation. So the application of our modules, because they're modular, they can be in very, very small applications or very, very large. We've also come up with a way to rotate them for easy maintenance purposes. So that means we've put rotating walls on car parks and on the side of very busy motorways so that when you maintain them, you literally flip them
00:24:19
Speaker
So they're facing the opposite side, so it's very, very safe to maintain and easy. And of course, you mentioned, and I've mentioned earlier, our breathing technology, which is an activated living wall system. So we have our standard jungle firewall.
00:24:39
Speaker
Then we have our breathing wall and the breathing wall is what we've I would say we've invested most of our research into with the scientists that at University of Technology Sydney, the results of our breathing wall.
00:24:54
Speaker
have astounded them. And I have to say a little bit, the industry, sometimes they think we're making it up, because it does sound too good to be true. But honestly, every piece of research we've done on this particular product has been peer reviewed.
00:25:12
Speaker
There are so many pieces of research on this that the scientists at UTS were actually peer reviewed as having the largest global body of research on green walls in the world. So it is very, very much backed by scientific research and our breathing wall
00:25:32
Speaker
is literally a system where we have created what we call a plenum, which is an air cavity behind the wall. We've introduced small fans. They're not very big. They don't use a lot of energy. They're literally the size of a computer fan or something you'd see about as big as your palm. And what the fans do is they are able to draw polluted air
00:25:58
Speaker
into the air cavity or the plenum behind the breathing wall. And the air has nowhere to go but through the root systems of the plants, through the back of our breathing module, through directly into the root systems. And it's the plant's root systems that actually remove the nasty pollutants that are circulating in our air. As I mentioned before, it's particulate matter, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds.
00:26:24
Speaker
And the breathing wall has been proven scientifically to remove those pollutants faster than any other type of plant system on the market today. And there's a lot of other benefits as well. It reduces temperature, it improves, improves obviously with the pollutants being removed, it pushes out higher volumes of clean air, which means you're getting a lot better air quality.
Community Impact and Biophilic Design Awards
00:26:52
Speaker
if it's applied internally, that's really what's driving that $3.44 return because you're getting basically a biofilter working as hard if not harder than the HVAC system. I think it's where the industry needs to go. I think integrating this extra component of tech to sort of 2x or 3x the impact of these walls is absolutely
00:27:18
Speaker
the way to answer the doubters and to just take it to the next level and rather than just relying on six, seven, eight plants per person in a room, which tends to be the sort of figures that you get pumped out of later and research, but just saying, well, actually we can, with a little bit of tech included, we can then really take it much further.
00:27:41
Speaker
And it's low tech, it's not high tech, it's low tech. And definitely this, and with the pop plants, it's interesting you mentioned that because we actually have produced a version of our breathing tech, which we call our breathing stand. And it literally is to replace the volume of pop plants you would need to do the same thing.
00:28:00
Speaker
So our breathing stand uses about 140 plants or thereabouts. It has its own lighting. It has its own water reservoir and irrigation. And the combination of those create an opportunity to produce cleaner volumes of air in an indoor environment than you would literally need hundreds of pot plants.
00:28:21
Speaker
that are taking up valuable real estate on your floor plate. So that's our next innovation match. We're testing it in the market at the moment. We've got some early prototypes out and we're already going into version two of that product. So it's performing quite well at the moment. It is often the problem. It's exactly that. It's the quantity of plants required to have a tangible impact on the indoor air quality versus taking up floor space.
00:28:49
Speaker
You know, floor space is usually just at such a premium. And then I'm kind of thinking, well, I can move them up, hang them from the ceiling, touch them to the walls, but you need to keep the floor free. And there, obviously, I'm immediately thinking about indoor spaces. But one of the things that caught my eye on your site was this manly veiled car park case study. And you mentioned a car park, but it's not typically where one would go looking for examples of biophilic design. But there's a hook on the story there, isn't there? I think this sounds like there was perhaps a
00:29:19
Speaker
some kind of a hurdle, getting the project over the line with the local community and then effectively the green wall saved the day.
00:29:27
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. So the original design of the Manivar car park was typical of any car park. It was a facade covered in, you know, steel. It was quite artistic, you know, it looked quite pretty, but the community 100% said no, not in my backyard, I do not want this car park. And so the government had a tricky situation on their hands and fortunately
00:29:50
Speaker
somebody introduced them to us at Junglify and we introduced our breathing technology and that's how we innovated actually the rotating breathing wall because it's a car park and it's a government project and they wanted the safety of maintaining it from the inside. So what we did is we covered that car park entirely in our breathing technology. We basically created a bio filter
00:30:15
Speaker
for a car park, which is unheard of really. Usually car parks are the ugliest but highly functional asset that you have in our cities. We've now created a car park that most people don't even realize it's a car park when they drive past. They think it's some fancy
00:30:31
Speaker
bar or retail facility because it looks so beautiful. And the community, when we re-pitched the design with it covered in plants, it went from absolutely not to, oh, yeah, that's great. We would love that. To the point where the local member of Parliament called us into his office at Parliament House and said, what did you do? Why does the community want this so badly? And we had to then explain
00:30:58
Speaker
you know why people love nature and plants and that looking down on a car park covered in plants actually makes them feel good as opposed to looking at something that's concrete and steel and full of cars. So we were able to transform a very functional and required asset to something that the community wanted and you know we're hearing similar feedback on the the ventilation shafts as well like these
00:31:26
Speaker
these assets that we have in our cities that can now perform multiple purposes. And I think this is what we have to do. We have to look at every asset, every built environment surface as an opportunity for urban greening and do it in a way that doesn't just look pretty, it has to perform as well and actually give back more than what it takes.
00:31:51
Speaker
I love it. I think the idea of the moss wall behind the reception desk, I think those days are probably gone and we all need to push things a little further. And I know one of the initiatives that you're supporting at the moment, I think that was actually how I came across you guys initially, was around this National Biophilic Design Awards and the Living Future Institute, which is the guys that I studied with a few years ago. It was a great course and if you haven't done it, I recommend that course as an online
00:32:20
Speaker
E-learning opportunity. It's awesome. I do as well. Talk to us about the awards relationship and what you're up to there. Look, this is really exciting because look, the International Living Future Institute has had biophilic design awards for some time and they have been global. But what we noticed is that there wasn't a lot of representation from Australian projects. And so the Living Future Institute of Australia, of which I was a board member for the last six years,
00:32:49
Speaker
and also worked on their biophilic design committee. I actually chaired the committee for some time. We came up with the idea of localising those design awards to really start to build, I think, and inspire people around biophilic design. Australia is one of those amazing markets that when we move, we can move quite quickly.
00:33:12
Speaker
and it only takes a handful of of projects to show that to lead the way and create a point of difference that then creates competition on the market. I think it's one of my favorite things about working in property but on the sustainability side of property is seeing them compete on the best sustainable or from a living future institute perspective the most resilient and restorative buildings that we're now seeing
00:33:40
Speaker
For us, for JungleFi, we see the Living Future Institute of Australia and the Living Building Challenge and the Biophilic Design Competition as leading the way, as providing that inspiration, but an achievable inspiration, I think, is the key here, Matt. These are for built structures, not for design.
00:34:02
Speaker
So they've been built, they're being used, they're, they're paving the way for the future. And I think that's really incredibly important to recognise because some of the early adopters, you know, they actually do pave the way for others. And there's lessons learned in every single project. And we just get better and better and better at it. So
00:34:26
Speaker
So without awards like this, I don't think people need to see what's possible and then learn the lessons and then be able to do it better next time. And that's competition on, I would say here in Australia. I love it. Yeah, go check out the Living Future Institute if you haven't. They're a very great online learning resource and I would definitely support that. We'll link to that in the show notes.
00:34:52
Speaker
The the awards that's 23. When are they one of the awards being announced in next year? So the awards are available now you can apply online now if you're in Australia They I think the award officially they close around the end of February so really great time to just register think about and they must be built form and it's for interiors and
00:35:16
Speaker
built environment and then buildings and communities. So it's from, you know, small scale inside round to sort of larger scale. And I don't think there's any time date on it either. So it could be a project that has been around for a while that probably hasn't had its biophilic design recognition because it probably wasn't considered a label, you know, five years ago. Very cool. Listen, thank you so much for your time. It's been really great talking to you.
00:35:44
Speaker
We'll add your website and all your social media onto the show notes as well. Susie, thanks again. Thanks, Matt. Absolute pleasure.