Faragon's blog

I’ve mentioned before that you can search for alternate uses for your waste such as charities that benefit from recyclable materials, but you can do much more in and around your house.

Glass:
With a simple LED and battery setup, you can make waterproof out-door lighting in case you have a party. Just put the jars on the ground and tables.
When you screw the lids of jars to the underside of your kitchen cabinet (I recommend baby food jar sizes here), you can store herbs in them. This also works on the underside of shelves in your cabinet itself for a more neat look. Bigger jars can be really useful in the same way near a workbench, for screws or small tools. (The same can be done for filo clay, or anything else you’ld like)
Jars (and some lidded bottles) can also be great for storing (tomato) sauces, home made pesto, and more things that could stain your plastic containers.
Keep bottles of (drinkable) water in the fridge, this saves energy (less loss of cold when you open the door) and you have cold water handy if you’re thirsty. Water in glass bottles stays cool much longer than in plastic ones!

Candles:
This is something you should only do when you really will do something with it, or it will just clutter up your house, but making candles can be a very fun and rewarding thing to do for grown ups and kids alike. Save up old candle stubs, melt them down and make new ones. Much more fun than the store bought variety!

Broken tableware:
This too is something that could seriously clutter up your house, but you can make mosaics from broken plates, tiles etc. You could make a table top, a little wall hanging or anything else you’ld like.
It can also be convenient to keep some handy in case you need to cover up the big holes in the bottoms of planters.

Fabric:
You can make pillow cases out of your old sweater, or save up for a “memory quilt”.
Old jeans can be made into shorts for around the house, or even a skirt with a bit more effort.
Your favorite old t-shirt with that awesome print might still work as a dress, or boxers, just lay down something on top of it as a pattern, draw it, cut around it with a margin for the seams and sew it together.

I came across a very interesting TED-talk today.
Besides sustainable living being good for the environment, it can also be good for you.
William Li talks of how specific types of food contain compounds (anti-angiogenics) that can help your body fight (and more importantly prevent) a large range of diseases, including cancer and obesity by regulating how receptive your body is to making new blood-vessels.
The implications of this are huge. By changing your diet to include specific foods, you could reduce your risk of cancer, and even fight obesity.

As Mr. Li says, this could be used as a preventive measure for cancer for people who don’t have the funds to have “regular” treatment when they do get cancer, by eating locally available sustainable foods. We too can do this, not because we can’t afford to treat diseases, but because we really are better off if we don’t contract them at all.
In this light, we can all benefit from eating locally, maybe even growing some of our own herbs and vegetables, like parsley, tomatoes, garlic, raspberries, and lavender (I happen to have those in my very own garden, doing very well if I may add). There’s much more you can grow, and a lot more you can purchase nearby. I love most of those vegetables anyway, so incorporating them in my diet is a joy rather than a sacrifice to me.

I have a proposition for all of you.
If you would like to try your hand at composting your kitchen waste and growing your own foods, I’ll help you by supplying you with healthy organic soil and worms for your compost bin, and compost for your plants.

And now, without further ado:

For clarity, I’ll add a list of the foods that he shows in his talk here:

There’s a couple of things that you can do to minimize your waste output, by not getting unrecyclable materials in your house to begin with.

When you go shopping, bring your own sturdy bags. This saves only a little bit of plastic at a time, but it does add up if you realize how many bags you accept without giving it a second thought a week or a month. Most people think of groceries here, but consider clothing and gadget shopping too!
If you do find yourself in a supermarket without a bag, see if they have boxes or crates (like the type used for fruit) that you can use. They’re going to throw them out (usually without recycling), but you can use them at home to collect paper or glass that you can recycle later.
When you can’t find a box or crate, or if you have to travel in such a way that you can’t use one. Get the tougher type of grocery bag. You can use it as a garbage bag, or fold it up and keep it in your bag/coat pocket/purse so that you can use it again.

Be selective in what you buy, see if you can buy fresh rather than canned. A lot more healthy, almost always better tasting, and more of an incentive to make something out of it before it goes bad.
Don’t go shopping hungry and make a list before you go to the store.
That way you don’t have to throw out as much food that you didn’t eat (and usually you buy less junkfood, and more stuff that is good for you).

Instead of shopping in a supermarket, try to plan one trip a week to a (farmer’s) market. There you can just take most veggies without a bag around them, and most fruits with paper bags. Also, when you buy eggs there, bring the old egg carton from home and have that filled up.
I probably don’t even have to mention that supermarkets have produce that is usually more expensive, and not as high a quality as that from a market stand.

Invest in some good containers. By a relatively small investment (and some re-use of take-out containers) you can make your food last a lot longer with less effort. Try cooking a few servings more than you’ll need, it will take about the same amount of time, but you can keep the extra servings in the fridge or freezer as a quick meal when you’re in a hurry.
This is also very wise when you are on a tight budget!

Then there’s the more passive intake of junk. Mail.
Most people get some magazines in the post (mine used to end up in the recycle bin without even having been read). Index what you have coming in, and cancel any subscriptions that you don’t actively read.
It can also really pay off to prevent flyers and discount folders from coming in by stating that you don’t want them on your mailbox.
By now you can find most of those online, and they usually only encourage you to buy things you don’t need at that moment.

Recycle where and what you can, but remember, it’s much more efficient to not have to recycle a glass jar around green beans or carrots if you could have bought them fresh at the market.

And finally, be creative with the waste that you do accumulate. The insides of toiletpaper rolls are a very hot item for kindergartens, a charity near you might collect old paper or cans to raise funds etc.

Ever since I can remember, my mom has been an avid “gardener”. We only had a little balcony as I grew up, but I like to think that’s where I picked up a fondness of sustainable gardening (and living).
I remember the compost bin we had on our balcony (an old plastic garbage bin with holes drilled into it and a flap in the bottom), where my mom tried her hand at composting our vegetable waste.

There’s two ways to start composting, over open ground and in a closed container. The same basic principles apply, but it’s slightly easier to compost over open ground, as some of the necessities will eventually sort themselves out over time.
However, to give your open ground compost container a good start, you pretty much need the same as for a closed container.
Oddly enough, neither of those methods is smelly. The bins just give off a fresh earthy smell that I associate with a forrest or a freshly turned flowerbed.
The closed container is so free of smell you can easily use it indoors, for instance under the sink!

What you need to get started is the following:

• A container
• Worms
• Some healthy organic soil
• Roughage (newspapers or hay)
• Some water
• Things you want to compost

Let’s begin with what container you need. It depends greatly on the space you have available, and if you’re going to be composting over open ground or not.
Over open ground you can buy a compost container (I bought mine for about 15 Euro a few years back) or you can build your own, for instance by making a circle out of wire mesh about a meter high and a meter in diameter.
Loosen up the earth where the container will be placed before you place it.

When you don’t have a garden, three deep stackable containers of the same size will work fine.
You should drill holes in the sides and bottoms of two of the containers. You want the holes in the bottom to be large enough to accomodate worms to easily go through, and placed about 5 cm’s apart. The holes in the sides are just for aeration and can be much smaller (after all, how much air can bottom dwelling organisms need?).
If you keep your worms content, they won’t try to escape.
Stack your containers so that the one without holes is on the bottom, place something in it to allow some extra space for the next container up to drain easily, and place the third container directly on the second one.

From here on in the procedure is the same for both methods.

Place some roughage in the bottom, shredded newspaper, hay or straw will do just fine. (Preferably something that can retain moisture)
Now ad some water and make sure that most of it is wet, any excess water will drain automatically, but adding too much is just a waste of effort ;-)
Your worms now have a nice bedding, chuck them in.
As they live in soil, you need to add some here, about 2 – 3 cm’s should be ample. The benefit of using healthy soil is that it has a lot of micro organisms that are needed for a healthy plant life are already there and will be in the new soil after the composting process.
You should use healthy organic soil, as chemical fertiliser can be harmful to micro organisms and your worms.

Now you can start adding compostable materials.
All fruits and veggies, garden trimmings, egg shells, tea bags (without staples) etc. etc. Basically all organic materials except for meat.
You want to break all that stuff down, crush egg shells and see to it that the rest is in thin slices or small chunks. This is a lot easier for the worms to eat, which will speed up the whole process.
If you have a lid on your bin, close it and wait for a few months, all the while adding materials.

If you have the indoor version, when the top container is full, put it in the bottom most bin, and put the empty middle bin on top of it. This will give you a new bin, the worms will migrate to the top bin after consuming all of the edible materials in the middle bin.
Also, the water (“compost tea”) that accumulates in the bottom bin is very fertile. Dilute it and use it to water your indoor plants instead of throwing it out. You won’t need a fertilizer anymore :-)

Some of the stuff I put in my compost bin:

• Egg shells
• Onion and garlic skins
• Potato peelings
• Broccoli stems
• Flowers after they’ve bloomed
• Weeds and trimmings from the garden
• Rabbit waste (woodscrapings, hay and droppings)

We recently had a garbage strike over here. It was about 4 weeks before the garbage was being collected again in my neighborhood, and I hadn’t put the garbage out about a week-and-a-half before that.
In all that time, I didn’t have more than a garbage-bag-and-a-half worth of waste, including cat-litter, I would like to explain how I did that.

Did you know that on average about 20 to 60% (depending on your lifestyle) of our waste could be composted or recycled? Right now, most of that goes to landfills (sometimes after incineration), with all associated environmental implications, such as adding to your carbon footprint and residual waste that takes decades (or longer) to degrade.
Although (in the Netherlands) it’s relatively easy to separate your glass and paper from “regular” garbage, it isn’t the only thing you can do.

For a couple of years now, I’ve had my own compost bin, which is thriving by now. I try not to accept bags at stores, and I separate my glass and paper. I have the benefit of having a reasonably sized garden, so I can accomodate a compost bin that’s houses over a cubic meter of compost, but there’s lots *you* can do too!
I’ll explain about that in posts to come. I feel inspired now, so I’ll start writing, but feel free to give feedback or ask questions related to this so I can make future posts more informational.