A couple of weeks ago, Two Cents' Worth listener David Cohen got in touch with a question we loved: Could we find out from other Two Cents' Worth enthusiasts how they think Covid-19 could change the world?
We got some awesome replies.
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Photo: 123RF
One listener asked about whether Covid-19 could herald the loss of civil liberties in democratic countries, another about whether the pandemic could be a catalyst to eventually push New Zealand away from its destiny as a theme park and a farm. A third asked whether a price cap for all goods and services, including imports, would ensure the taxpayer will get long term value for the bailout.
We hope to get to some of these in the future, but for this episode, we took two questions.
The first was from David Cohen himself: “Coupled with the need to respond to global warming, is this the beginning of the end for mass tourism?” he asked, and in fact, that theme - Covid-19 as a catalyst for better environmental management - was picked up in a number of other questions.
The second question we chose was totally different. But equally fascinating. It was whether the virus would lead to a different way of designing everyday objects so that we don't have to touch them, and so germs can’t spread through them.
Door handles, for example, or light switches or taps - particularly when they’re installed in public places.
More on that one later.
Making sustainability part of the tourism rebuild
To answer David Cohen’s question about Covid-19 and mass tourism we got in touch with an expert at Otago University.
Professor James Higham works at the business school and one of his main areas of research is sustainable tourism. He co-edits the international, peer-reviewed Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
Higham is in lockdown at his home on the Otago Peninsula - a place once described by English botanist and TV presenter David Bellamy as “the finest example of eco-tourism in the world”.
Professor James Higham Photo: Supplied
Higham says Cohen’s question is particularly prescient as the impact of mass tourism on New Zealand has been top of mind since Simon Upton, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and former National MP, wrote a hard-hitting report published just before Christmas last year.
Entitled “Pristine, popular... imperilled? The environmental consequences of projected tourism growth”, the report warns of the downsides of the huge growth in international visitors – the numbers rose from one million in the early 1990s to almost four million last year, and before the coronavirus hit, they were predicted to rise to five million around 2024.
The pressures of mass tourism include biodiversity loss, water quality degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and sheer visitor numbers ruining some of the “wild” landscapes people come to see, Upton said.
Think the Tongariro Crossing hike, Franz Joseph, Milford Sound, Fox Glacier, or Roy’s Peak near Wanaka.
Tongariro Crossing is becoming overrun with tourists Photo: 123rf
“In selling access to these experiences, tourism risks becoming an extractive industry in its own right,” Upton said. “An inexorable growth in numbers risks an irreversible decline in both environmental quality and human experience of it. That could run the risk of ‘killing the goose that lays the golden egg’.”
The report also canvassed the biggest, scariest question of all: Given the fact practically every tourist has to take a long-haul flight to get here, is there a long-term future for international tourism in New Zealand at all?
That was in the BC era - 'Before Covid'. Now we have no international tourists, and no domestic ones either. And that scenario is unthinkably harsh for the thousands of big and small tourism operators in New Zealand, Higham says.
Tourism is basically going to have to do what electricity generators call a “black start” - gearing up from a total shutdown.
The first step, he says, is to help businesses survive, and to try to restore some economic certainty in extremely uncertain times.
But as part of rebuilding the sector, “we have the opportunity to stop and think and we have the opportunity to rebuild a more sustainable tourism system”, he says.
“I think of it in terms of rewiring the tourism system. If you think of rewiring a house, it’s a huge commitment, a huge cost and a significant undertaking, but it’s much easier to wire the house when you're rebuilding the house.
Could COVID-19 give us the opportunity to rewire our tourism sector to be more sustainable? Photo: (Photo by John Carlisle on Unsplash)
“There’s a lot of pain and uncertainty and stress currently around the sector, but we could have the opportunity to rebuild the sort of tourism industry the Parliamentary Commissioner’s report talks about.”
Higham thinks New Zealand has been slow to respond to challenges related to climate change. “We have an opportunity for disruption at this time to reimagine and build a future-proofed tourism industry that will help solve climate change issues to 2050 and well beyond that.”
Tourism optimisation
Researchers around the world are looking at something called “tourism optimisation”, Higham says.
That’s about accepting that not all tourists bring the same value, not just in terms of what they spend, but also in terms of the damage they do to the environment and local resources. The idea is that we should try to target the ones that bring the greatest benefits and the least costs.
And the big spenders aren’t necessarily the optimum tourists, Higham says. If you are looking at it through an environmental lens you could argue that a backpacker that spends a few months tootling about the country in a campervan - or even better on a bike - is more valuable than a guy that flies in, stays in top-of-the-range lodges - lodges that are expensive to build and run - and takes helicopter flights over Franz Joseph and Milford Sound.
“In a far-flung destination like New Zealand, we need to target tourists that don't’ have to travel so far to get here, because of the link between the distance of travel and carbon footprint. We also want those who stay longer.
James Higham suggests we look at "tourist optimisation" and encourage visitors who plan to stay longer. Photo: Supplied / Air NZ
“Rather than visitors that fly in and fly out, we’d seek to pursue markets with visitors that stay here longer, even more so because people who stay here longer tend to be more dispersed in their travel.
“That takes pressure, in theory, away from those destinations under so much stress from visitor numbers, and shares the benefits with communities which don't see many tourists.”
It’s not going to be easy to get buy-in. Many operators will understandably be desperate for any kind of tourist to start coming back.
And growing international visitor numbers have been used in the past as a way to get us out of an economic crisis in the past.
“Tourism is critically important to New Zealand,” Higham says. “Ten years ago, after the GFC, tourism was seen as a leader for the economic rebound. At the time the Prime Minister John Key became the Minister for Tourism and implemented some ambitious projects aimed at tourism leading the recovery.”
Higham says the Government may need to be involved again this time, but the focus should be on sustainable growth.
“This rewiring I’m talking about may have Government having a stronger hand shaping and influencing how this rebuild unfolds.”
Designing better door knobs
Our second question around how Covid-19 could change the world is totally different. To recap: “Willthe Covid-19 virus result in a change in the way we design everyday objects so that we don't have to touch them, and so germs can’t spread through them. You know, like door handles, light switches, or taps - particularly when they’re installed in public places.”
The question about how everyday objects could be adapted to help prevent infection is an interesting one because it encompasses everything from design and architecture to psychology to chemistry and nanotechnology.
Bill McKay is a senior lecturer at Auckland University’s School of Architecture and Planning. He’s an advocate of what he calls “brown bread design”. That’s design that's good for you - that makes everyday life better for people.
Bill McKay working from his home basement Photo: Bill McKay
He thinks about things like accessibility and how design is used in hospitals to help prevent infection and to make it easier for people to get around.
Take doors.
Of course, there are already a lot of Covid-friendly door designs. Ones where you don’t have to touch them with your hand.
Automatic doors, or ones with a big red button you can push with your elbows, or ones with a flat plate you push with your shoulder. There are even doors that work with a foot pedal, and some hospitals have smoke prevention doors which stay open most of the time, so people can get through easily but close automatically if the smoke alarms go off.
“They are very expensive, those sorts of things, but if they became more popular [possibly because of Covid-19], you could get into mass-producing them, and then they might get cheaper.”
In terms of door handles, McKay says a lever handle is much easier to use without your hands touching the surface than a doorknob, although it’s less easy if you are having to pull the door towards you.
Which is why some of McKay’s colleagues at Auckland University’s Creative Design and Additive Manufacturing Lab have designed a 3D printed attachment for a door handle which allows you to open the door with your arm
If you want one, they can print one for you.
Toilet doors design isn't just about the handles. Photo: 123RF
McKay says toilet doors are a particular design bugbear, but it isn’t about the handles.
“I always think toilet doors open the wrong way. You can push your way through the door into the toilet, but after you’ve washed your hands you need to use the lever to pull the door to get out again. If someone else has been there before you, it doesn’t matter how well you’ve washed your hands you're still touching what could be a dirty door handle.”
How about taps?
McKay says when he and his wife renovated an old villa early in their marriage they replaced the existing kitchen taps with hospital taps - the ones that are long levers you can operate with your elbow.
“I put them in because we all eat chicken these days and chicken can be quite lethal in terms of salmonella and so I’ve always been quite careful to put hospital taps in.”
What your objects are made of can also make a difference in terms of preventing the spread of germs, McKay says.
“Copper has really good anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, even anti-virus properties, and so brass fixtures also have that because of the copper in them.”
Silver is also used widely in the health industry - in bandages, creams, or as an antibiotic coating on medical devices - because of its antimicrobial properties.
Copper has good anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, even anti-virus properties. Photo: Supplied
Nanotechnology
The next level is creating artificial surfaces designed specifically for their ability to protect us against Covid-19 or other viruses.
That’s something that scientists, innovators and educators at the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology are specifically looking at, with different researchers taking different paths.
For example, associate professor Volker Nock from the University of Canterbury is looking at whether we could mimic plant structures to create a protective surface.
“Plants are thought to actively encourage the development of healthy and balanced communities of beneficial microorganisms on their leaves, similar to what happens in our gut,” he says. “Such healthy communities tend to be very good at keeping the less beneficial varieties at bay.”
Biomimicry or innovation inspired by nature could be the key to creating anti-viral surfaces. Photo: papan saenkutrueang
Nock is talking about the possibilities from biomimicry - innovation inspired by nature. It’s increasingly popular in science.
Think kingfishers inspiring bullet trains, velcro mimicking the tiny hooks on burrs, or lotus leaves influencing the creation of super-waterproof surfaces.
“It’s not too far-fetched that if we learn that certain nano-structures help plants keep their leaves healthy, we could also copy these structures onto say door handles and other surfaces we touch.”
Meanwhile, associate professor Geoff Willmott from the University of Auckland is also looking at surfaces, in particular, whether we can manipulate the chemical make-up or the structure of a surface, from a nanoparticle level, to stop viruses.
Either by making the surface really rough, or by making it really slippery, like the lotus leaf, so droplet-borne viruses like Covid-19 just can’t stick
“There’s a cool technology coming out of RMIT in Melbourne where surfaces have spikes on them which kill bacteria and don’t allow them to grow.”
Auckland University Senior Lecturer Dr Jenny Malmström is also looking at creating nanotechnology surfaces that hinder the spread of viruses. This is important because viruses can sit on surfaces for days and infect the next person that comes along.
Malmström says there are three areas of research that look promising.
The first is creating non-stick surface coatings - “think your Teflon pan for a virus”, she says. “There is a lot of science already on anti-fouling surfaces used in fields from the shipping industry to the medical field or food technology.”
The second involves surfaces that do the opposite, she says. “They work a bit like a nano-velcro, where the virus attaches so firmly it would be unlikely to be picked up by someone else afterwards.”
The third, and perhaps most obvious, Malmström says is creating materials and coatings that can destroy or kill the virus.
“Certain metals like copper and silver are known to kill bacteria and that’s why we often see copper surfaces in hospitals, but there are also chemical coatings that work by punching bacteria, a bit like a nano-sword, and these types of materials are also being explored as anti-viral coatings.”
Dr Jenny Malmström says there are three areas of nanotechnology surface research that look promising for combating virus spread. Photo: LEONELLO CALVETTI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
So how close are these clever anti-viral surfaces to hitting a doorknob, a light switch or a lift panel near us soon? It could take a while before these things are in commercial production, Malmström says.
“I think it’s unlikely we will have a magic bullet for our everyday items any time soon, but I do think successful strategies are likely to combine several mechanisms. So you might see a coating that is trying to reduce the attachment of a virus, while at the same time it’s trying to destroy a virus that does attach.”
