Connecting people, places and plants: biophilia with Junglefy, Australia
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. 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.
Junglefy 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.
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.
our Discussion topics related to biophila
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
Full transcript follows, please excuse any typos!
Matt Morley
Could you start by giving us a quick intro to the Junglefy business? I'd be particularly interested in understanding how its products and services have evolved over the years?
urban greenery and green walls
Suzie Barnett
Yeah, absolutely. So 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 early on in the design process of the built environment to make sure we can give the latest information on how these products should be installed, and also maintained. And then we do the installation and the maintenance.
Our systems are modular so that gives our clients an opportunity to have a much longer life for the plants than other systems. Has it always been that way? No, we started out life 13 years ago as a landscaping business but we had a lot of people asking for these things called green walls so the owners decided to start a sister business called Junglefy.
They had both businesses running at the same time, the landscaping business and the green wall business. And the green wall business was, I think the thing that excited them the most, and they saw the future in the market. They decided to close down the landscaping business and purely focus on green walls, which has evolved a lot over the last 13 years to look at roofs and facades and different types of products fit for purpose, depending on the opportunity and what the clients are looking for.
At the beginning, Junglefy 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, but it's very hard at that time to get the best outcomes. 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 real estate developers and architects even conceptualize what they want. And clients come to us and say, 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 of just looking good on day one. And then after year one, year two, year three, you know, it starts to degrade, whereas we design it to look good at year one, year five year 10, you know, well into perpetuity. And I think that's probably the biggest evolution of what we do.
the business case for adding plants, biophilia and nature into real estate
Matt Morley
What are the key drivers behind your clients decisions to to start working with you, what makes them decide they need to bring some of the outside world in with greenery, with indoor landscaping, possibly a green wall?
Suzie Barnett
It's a combination of all of those things. 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.
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 an opportunity to rethink that and look at how we can design and build with nature at the forefront. So it's inclusive to, are they still? 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, fit for purpose and for longevity.
So, a couple of years ago, we actually commissioned an organization called the Center for International Economics. They are people who take data and convert it into dollar terms. And this is something that normally only governments ask for because they're paying tax, they're spending taxpayers dollars.
benefits of green walls - productivity, positivity, air quality
We asked them, what would that look like using our scientific data for our return on investment, for a particular product that we have called breathing technology, which is an activated green wall essentially. 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 inside, because they're very active at cleaning the air, removing nasty pollutants, such as co2, particulate matter, vocs.
Thanks to that biophilic response that we have with nature, if we put a breathing wall externally, the CIA report told us that you'd get $1.95 in return. 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.
The property sector is very much price driven. We had to convert that feel good notion of plants, making people happy, into real dollar terms, and that's where we're at now. And we're starting to see that driving decision making now beyond just it being an aesthetic, 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 you know, the CIO, entire economic times, it all comes down to dollars. So the combination of scientific research and economics is is definitely driving decisions.
It's quite frustrating, because the science on plants and our relationship to them is, is probably the largest global body of evidence you will see on anything. And yet people still question its value. Yet we see it's starting to resonate, I feel optimistic that this information is starting to hit the market, and the early adopters are using it to their advantage.
Matt Morley
I know one of the questions from a client will be - “okay, great. It's gonna cost x to setup, the upfront investment and installing a wall indoors or out, then what about ongoing costs?
From your experience, when would a living will be a sensible choice and in what circumstances should it perhaps be avoided or replaced with an alternative? There must be some instances where you just have to be honest with the client and say, look, this is going to be a challenging space to maintain long-term.
when to install a green wall and what are its challenges
Suzie Barnett
You're absolutely right, 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. So every failure of a greenwall is someone's reason not to do it in the future.
The initial capex cost is definitely a barrier for adoption for some because you've got different decision makers and different budgets, and what a developer will want to do may not align with the interests of the company managing that development in the longer term.
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 wall system, then they're not the ones paying for it down the track when the problems mount up, it's going to be the the future owner, facility manager, or tenants, you name it. So that is certainly one of the biggest challenges.
We've certainly said no to projects, when they have not wanted to invest in the correct lighting or irrigation system because we're also the company that's maintaining it, and we don't want to create more problems in the future, we only want to create a really good solution. The way around that really comes down to education and making sure that those who are making early decisions, are aware that they're making decisions on behalf of others in the future.
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 come back, when they realize, you know, this is what we really want, and we appreciate it, they want that kind of advice.
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 just on day one, you must be thinking longer term; the benefits of the plants totally outweigh any of the costs.
green facades in green buildings - living infrastructure
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 BREEAM globally, and Green Star had a perceived cost, so people would sometimes say “we can't do it, it's going to cost too much”.
We're seeing the same now looking at any kind of living infrastructure or nature based solution. And I think what's going to 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.
Factors to consider before installing a green wall
Clients must think about lighting, accessibility, how will it be accessed in the future, if it's in a really hard to access place, so you can't get to it on a ladder or ropes then the plants will eventually fail because they need to be looked after just like us. So access and future maintenance is really important. Plant selection is absolutely critical. It's all about the light and it's all about what types of plants will survive inside on a north facade versus on an east or west facade.
Plants are pretty predictable actually when it comes to which 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, no one buys a car thinking that the day they hand over the money, and by 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!
public-private collaboration for green facade maintenance costs
The other concept that we've been considering, and obviously, this is much bigger than Junglefy, this is an industry wide idea 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 they're creating biodiversity habitat, they're cooling temperatures down there cleaning the air to some degree, you know, they and they look amazing. A leafy Street is what adds value to any property.
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? 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, or green facade is community wide, not just to the benefit of the users of that building.
product innovation in green wall design
Matt Morley
So it's interesting, because you've got concept, design, plant selection, installation, ongoing maintenance, but there's also this piece of the front end around manufacturing the technical components too. Not every company out there does this and I find it to be one of your sort of USPs.
Suzie Barnett
Yes, we have taken our knowledge, our 13 years of experience and we've invested a lot in 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 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 it 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.
The first innovation that we came up with was our, our module itself. 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 because they're already established. And the X frame is our system of installing that on site. So you literally, we 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 that go in last, because once the plants are there, 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.
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 to stop and go, Wow, how amazing is that? Whereas up to that point, they're a little bit like, what are you doing? 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.
Biophilic in public infastructure projects
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. At the moment we're installing mega modules on quite a controversial project in Sydney, their ventilation shafts as part of an underground tunneling project called the WestConnex. But 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. Now they're they're creating an amazing opportunity for biodiversity to establish themselves and can connect to the ventilation shafts with the parklands, so the surrounding it.
So the application of our modules, because they're modular, they can, 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 you know, 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. So they're facing the opposite side, it's very safe to maintain and easy.
science-backed research into benefits of green wall systems
Then our breathing technology, which is an activated living wall system, we have our standard jungle firewall, then we have our breathing wall. And the breathing wall is what we've invested most of our research into with the scientists at University of Technology Sydney, the results of our breathing wall 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.
So it is very much backed by scientific research. And our breathing wall 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 a pipe about as big as your palm. And what the fans do is draw polluted air into the air cavity or the plenum behind the breathing wall, the air has nowhere to go but through the root systems of the plants through the back of our breathing module, directly into the root systems. And it's the plants root systems that actually remove the nasty pollutants that are circulating in our air.
As I mentioned before it's all about particulate matter, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) 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 air temperature, it pushes out higher volumes of clean air, which means you're getting a lot better air quality. 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 high tech system.
Matt Morley
I think it's absolutely where the industry needs to go Suzie - integrating this extra component of tech to enhance the tangible impact of these walls is the way to answer the doubters and take it to the next level.
Suzie Barnett
To be clear, it's actually quite low tech. We produced a version of our breathing tech, which we call our breathing stand. And it literally is to replace the volume of pot plants you would need to do the same thing. So our breathing stand, uses about 140 plants, it has its own lighting, it has its own water reservoir and irrigation. And the combination of those elements creates an opportunity to produce cleaner volumes of air in an indoor environment, then you would literally need hundreds of pot plants that are taking up valuable real estate on your floor plate.
Matt Morley
It's exactly that, the sheer quantity of plants required to have a tangible impact on the indoor air quality versus taking up floor space, it' always comes up in interior design projects in particular.
One of the things that caught my eye on your site was this Manly Vale carpark case study - not somewhere typically we're looking for examples of biophilic design.. tell us about that?
green walls for car parks and other public real estate
Suzie Barnett
Yes, absolutely. So the original design of the car park was typical of any other car park basically - it was a facade covered in steel, it was quite artistic, you know, it looked quite pretty. But the local 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.
Fortunately, somebody introduced them to us at Junglefy and we suggested 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 carpark entirely in our breathing technology, we basically created a biofilter for a car park, which is unheard of really - usually car parks are the ugliest things but highly functional. 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 bar or retail facility because it looks so beautiful.
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, you know why people love nature and plants and that looking down on the carpark 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 require an asset to something that the community wanted. And, you know, we're hearing similar feedback on the ventilator. shafts as well like these, 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 that doesn't just look pretty it has to perform as well and actually give back more than what, what it takes.
Matt Morley
I know one of the initiatives that you're supporting is the national biophilic design award with the living future Institute. I in fact studied with them online a few years ago, I fully recommend that course too!
Suzie Barnett
This is really exciting, because the International Living future Institute has had a 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, and also worked on their biophilic design committee, I actually chaired the committee for some time, we came up with the idea of of localizing those design awards to really start to inspire people in Australia around biophilic design.
Australia is one of those amazing markets that when we move, we can move quite quickly. And it only takes a handful of projects to lead the way and create a point of difference that then creates competition in the market. I think it's one of my favorite things about working in property here.
On the sustainability side of properties, seeing them compete on the best sustainable, or the most resilient and restorative buildings that we're now seeing come online. So for us for Junglefy, you know, we see the Living Future Institute of Australia and the Living Building Challenge and the biophilic design competition as leading the way.
These are for built structures, not just concepts or designs. So they've been built, they're being used, they're paving the way for the future. And I think that's really incredibly important to recognize, because some of the early adopters, you know, they actually do pave the way for others. There's lessons learned in every single project. We just get better and better at it.
Without awards like this I don't think people see what's possible, or learn the lessons to be able to do it better next time.