Appreciating old skills is what we admired about Australia when migrating 30 years ago and it is still valued today. 

Signwriter John Davidson has hand-painted the numbers on to the freshly repainted black Tathra PO boxes.

He recalled that he had painted those PO boxes seven years ago.

Deb Alker from Tathra Post Office commented that stickers never hold that long. That would be especially true when the sun is hitting them and the heat would dissolve the glue. We cannot replace some trades and skills with plastic.

Quite often repair of quality items is far better than buying a new plastic item instead, which sometimes breaks during the first use. Antique items are only still around, because they used quality materials,  good craftsmanship and people looked after them.

Vintage cars are a great example of old-fashioned lovingly restored vehicles, mostly far more stylish and pretty than new 4WDs, which are not even needed on most roads.

In a world that is using five times more resources than our planet can produce, we should really rethink what we buy, if we need it or what impact our consumerism has on our planet.

I know I want my children to still have a liveable planet with clean water, clean land and clean air.

As coordinator for Boomerang Bags Bega Valley Sapphire Coast I would appreciate less plastic packaging and supermarkets not handing out plastic bags so liberally, only if clients forgot their own shopping bags or baskets.

This month has had a mix of good and not so good news on the climate change front.

A good news story: Last month some 197 countries agreed to a deal to reduce emissions of factory-made hydrofluorocarbon gases (HFCs).

HFCs are reportedly 100,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases and emissions have been increasing as sales of fridges and air conditioning have been increasing in developing economies such as China and India.

The reduction will be phased in with the US and Europe aiming to reduce the output of these gases by 85 per cent by 2036 with China – the world’s worst – freezing their use by 2024.  A small group of less-developed countries will start the reduction in 2029.  

According to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development,  the agreement is likely to result in “largest temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement”.

And according to the US Natural Resources Defense Council, the deal is “equal to stopping the entire world's fossil-fuel CO2 emissions for more than two years”.

Which, by itself, is all good.

But to keep it in perspective: According to the IEA Clean Coal Centre, there are over 2300 coal-fired power stations worldwide (7000 individual units). Approximately 620 of these power stations are in China.

So the bigger issue remains. And the planet is still getting warmer

The global warming trend continues, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for August 2016 was the highest for August in the 137-year period of record, marking the 16th consecutive month of record warmth for the globe.”