By Peter Hannam
CHOON Ming Tang knows a bit about economising and extravagance.
As one of six children, Mr Tang remembers working as a four-year-old, tugging out weeds by hand on the family's 1½ acre rented paddy field in northern Malaysia.
Decades later, a construction firm he ran with a brother built palaces for the oil-rich Sultan of Brunei.
Now part-owner and head of South Pacific Laundry, one of Melbourne's largest industrial laundries, Mr Tang's focus is on minimising water and power used at his Brunswick plant.
New recycling equipment has helped cut water use from 25 litres a kilo of linen to just 5 litres. Energy use has dropped from 14 million joules to 5 million for the same volume of laundry.
Mr Tang, a civil engineer by training, says investing $15 million in new machinery provided the bulk of those efficiency gains.
Even so, a $50,000 grant from Sustainability Victoria last year in a program to nudge firms to do more to reduce resource-use has delivered extra savings.
This helped pay for consultants and additional metering, motivating Mr Tang to make changes he would not have made on his own.
"There are so many things to do," Mr Tang said. "When someone else is there, you get the prompt."
The audit identified additional spending totalling $450,000, which will generate annual savings of $250,000 in water, gas and labour.
His laundry is now something of a showroom, drawing visitors including competitors keen to learn about savings of their own.
While voluntary efforts are worth supporting, Mr Tang also thinks other measures, including higher prices may be needed to force companies to be more thrifty.
"People stick to old habits," he says. "If they don't feel pain, people will not wake up."