Conservation: Reuse/Reduce/Recycle

[Ken Scharabok]

I didn't want to hijack the current thread on how wasteful American area. What do you do to practice conservation, which includes reducing, reusing and recycling.

Some from me:

- I keep an empty one-gallon milk-type jug in the kitchen. Into it is pushed all of those little scraps of plastic generated (e.g., newspaper rain sleeves, wrappers from individual slices of cheese, meat wrappers, supermarket vegetable bags). When I absolutely can't cram in any more using a pushing stick, it then goes into the aluminum/can/plastic recycle can.

- My bluejeans tend to wear out first in the area between the crotch and knee. I'll put on one of those soft iron-on patches (on the inside) there when the jeans are still new.

- A bag of recycle or household trash doesn't go to the county dumpster sites until it is absolutely full, such as packed down. Figure out what each of those bags are costing you. Maybe not much each, but it adds up over a year.

- I sell a lot on eBay and use the plastic thank you bags for cushioning.

- I send out a lot of Priority Mail flat rate envelopes. I cut up cardboard boxes into pieces about 8" x 10" and use them for stiffeners in these.

- In my shop I go through a couple of thousand of dollars worth of new steel a year. What gets recycled may be a 3-lb coffee can a year. If I were to cut off say an inch of stock, it gets tossed into a box on a table. When I just need a small piece of stock for something, funny how many times I can find pretty well exactly what I need in that box.

- In my shop I also generate about a 5-gallon bucket full of bandsaw filings a year. These are sold on eBay for various uses.

- Junk mail goes inside a newspaper. Newspapers themselves go into a double layer of the plastic shopping bags for eash of handling. For catalogs I keep a separate set of bags as they typically stack nicely. They are filled until they pretty well won't hold any more.

[Mid Tn Mama]

Thanks Ken!

Junk mail and small paper packaging goes in to the chicken coop for bedding. What comes out is terrific compost. I don't even shred the paper!

Plastic containers are first used for starting plants, then are recycled.

Plastic bags are saved for garden harvest, then recycled.

Food scraps go to dogs, cats, chickens, worms.

Cardboard and paper packaging goes in to the garden for mulch. This has saved me time weeding and has created the most lucious black earth full of worms from hard clay soil.

I reused aluminum foil.

I use glass mayo jars for leftovers and storing grains and beans.

We must haul our garbage, so we think hard about it.

[Seeria]

For us, there are four R’s: Reuse, recycle, reduce, and out right refuse. We can’t always do this, yet, but we’re getting there. The following is a list we keep posted to help us remember and keep track of progress. We've not accomplished everything, of course, but we're getting there slowly.


Purchasing Reminders
Less Consumption!!! Shop less.
Refuse plastic shopping bags
Buy used, buy maintainable, buy durable.
Organic, cruelty free, local, fair-trade, bulk, container-smart.
Natural is best! Non-toxic. Animal free.
Non-toxic, biodegradable, recyclable.

Health & Hygiene
Natural is the best.
No make-up, no hair dyes, no perms, no curling irons, hair dryers, etc
Natural ingredients. Stay organic.
Prevention.
Lower stress
Fitness
Natural medicines, alternative, homeopath, herbal.

Kitchen
Paper towels!! Other ways to do what we used to use paper towels for.
Cloth napkins
No oven. How to bake without an oven.
Wood burning stoves, ovens. Cob. Masonry.
Solar cooking
Canning methods
Freezing (although we plan limited needs for a freezer)
Drying
Smoking
Curing
Cast iron cookware
Bread making, especially how to bake breads in fire ovens
Wine & vinegar making
Cheese, no bovine dairy. Soy, goat, ??
Find, purchase highly efficient refrigerator or alternative
No electric appliances: microwave, oven, range, chest freezer, fryer, roasters, toaster, processor, etc. Goal is to learn to do these things ourselves with more efficient and sustainable tools.
Cold room and root cellaring

Garden
No grass lawns, use the space for herbs, food, or use no watering ground cover (like clover)
Reel mower (you know, the push, non-electric, non-engine type)
No electric tools, like trimmers, hedgers, mowers
Edible landscaping
Small scale herb, veg, fruit farming
Land management
Composting types and techniques
Seed gathering techniques

House In & Out
Natural ingredients for cleaning
Clean air systems
No electric items: demand hot water heater, possibly no washing machine, clothes dryer
Reduce usage: Less TV, less computer,
Roofing types, how-to, and maintenance
Strawbale construction
Llamas
Rabbit stock possibility

Community
Barter & trade
Buy local
Local sources for base needs we don’t do on the homestead, like eggs, soy/rice/goat milk & cheese, flours
Directory, a listing of those like-mind and services to offer
Donate
Out reach and volunteerism
Library donations and assistance
Advocate home education
Local transport systems, like bus

Power & Fuel
Energy use logging, this helps us to see how much we use & need to reduce
Forest maintenance (wood fuel), when we have land
Wood burning fireplaces, handmade and cast iron
Soy and bees wax candles, soy oil lanterns, solar charged lighting
Rechargeable batteries
Solar power
Wind power
No air-conditioner, natural alternatives
Passive cooling, green walls
Wiring know-how & repair
Compact fluorescent bulbs
Engine conversions to biodiesel
Unplug. Don’t just turn off, Unplug
Drive less, share rides.
Use the train, not the plane

Water
Composting toilets
Hand pump sinks and showers, no baths
Water storage, cisterns, collection, wells
Grey water management and uses
Water catching, rain & snow
Plumbing systems, how-to, alternatives, maintenance
Clay pot irrigations

[Ken Scharabok]

Wow. I wish you could work that up as an article and submit it to Countryside and Small Stock Journal magaizine.

[clovis]

Originally Posted by Ken Scharabok

I didn't want to hijack the current thread on how wasteful American area. What do you do to practice conservation, which includes reducing, reusing and recycling.

Some from me:

- I keep an empty one-gallon milk-type jug in the kitchen. Into it is pushed all of those little scraps of plastic generated (e.g., newspaper rain sleeves, wrappers from individual slices of cheese, meat wrappers, supermarket vegetable bags). When I absolutely can't cram in any more using a pushing stick, it then goes into the aluminum/can/plastic recycle can.

Ken, not trying to be critical, but are those plastics recyclable in your area? I was told that any plastics not labeled #1 and #2 actually make it harder for the processor to seperate this "trash" from the good plastics.

- My bluejeans tend to wear out first in the area between the crotch and knee. I'll put on one of those soft iron-on patches (on the inside) there when the jeans are still new.

I do this too. My jeans wear out where the back pockets are glued or sewn to the pant. Seems to make them last much longer.

- In my shop I also generate about a 5-gallon bucket full of bandsaw filings a year. These are sold on eBay for various uses.

What are the filings used for??? I am curious.

- Junk mail goes inside a newspaper. Newspapers themselves go into a double layer of the plastic shopping bags for eash of handling. For catalogs I keep a separate set of bags as they typically stack nicely. They are filled until they pretty well won't hold any more.

Our local recycler has asked for no plastic bags, because it makes the paper harder to recycle.

Clove

[clovis]

OOPS...I did something wrong in the above post...my questions were supposed to be highlighted.
Clove

[Ken Scharabok]

My recycling center doesn't particularly like them either, but it is a trade off. It is soooooo much easier to take them in in those shopping bags rather than trying to tie them up with string. Large grocery paper bags are hard to come by these days. Were they to dictate no shopping bags, I suspect their newspaper recycling would drop significantly.

[Maura]

We have a fuel efficient heating system- in floor radiant. Since we have a new house, it is well insulated
Everything except bones go into the compost. Bones are used for soup.
Newspaper is used as mulch.
Don't have much in the way of cans and bottles, but the recyclables get taken back to the store.
I make our soap, so no petroleum by-products there, except for the containers the oils come in, which are recyclable.
We only drive fuel efficient vehicles.
Have our own egg layers, so everything that goes along with that- and I'm going to attempt again to grow their grain this year.
The garden cuts down on fuel needed for commercial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and shipping.
We buy meat from a local farmer who pastures beef, pigs, and poultry.
The tv and computer are shut off at the source when we're done, not just shut off.
Cloth napkins
Air dry the laundry; efficient front loading washing machine.
The only time we water the lawn is during a drought so the livestock can be pastured on it.
Generally, don't buy junk food- waste of nutritious food being turned into garbage, packaging, bad health
Simple cleaning products, such as vinegar.
Feed the animals appropriate diets so there is no need for flea sprays, etc. Chickens forage for bugs.

[dragonflyz9C]

In my office we go through a lot of paper. The company owns 34 group homes and the reports that are generated are confidential so they are shredded. I use the shredded paper for my chicken's nesting boxes and for my composting worms. There is no way any information will be taken from those reports once my worms and chickens are done with them

[ldc]

Here, we have city recycling for cans, plastics, different colors of glass, newspapers and cardboard. It's a pretty new system, and very helpful so far. The trick is (as someone above said) to refuse to buy or accept some useful things in outrageous amounts of packaging. I'm trying this out slowly, and continue to try to re-use things, as they are here already! Such as containers for plants; that's a big one! ldc

[themamahen]

Well here in IDAHO plhhhhhhhhh really dislike it here cant even grow tomatoes or green beans. I use a LOT of canned spaghetti sauce and those lil tomato sauce cans green beans exc. and I have Juice cans and bottles and I have accumulated 2 X 13 gallon garbage bags of these this winter for my green house

[OntarioMan]

Originally Posted by Seeria

Buy used, buy maintainable, buy durable.

Many consumer products today are neither durable nor maintainable. Folks want cheap to purchase products, but the downside is that most products don't last.

[baldylocks]

Something we do with jeans...when they cannot be patched any longer (usually around the pockets etc for me), we cut off the legs and sew them into bags. Just close one end of the leg and make a tie strap out of the waist-band. You can get one or two bags per leg depending on sizes. They are pretty tough and great for containing tools (I keep my wrenches together in a bag in my tool box so they don't scatter).

[ChristyACB]

Some of the suggestions here are great and I've written them down for incorporation at home. Thanks!

What I do -
-Built home in 2005 so have very energy efficient appliances, front loaders, good windows and all of that. Now I know I could have done more though.
-Fully utilize our curbside recycling
-Compost
-Lawn only in front to avoid neighborhood wrath and that is only very small and has useful things in the beds.
-No chemical fertilizers at all anywhere.
-Back of house is .20 acres of nature with raised beds for food.
-Cleaning products are mixed bag of natural ones purchased and home-made
-Seek items with limited packaging and recyclable containers
-Use plastic tubs from items bought for seed sprouting and general garden work then recycle
-Buy limited number of truly useful clothing items centered on a single color so that I can mix and match; with a more classic style that can be used the next year
-Donate old clothing where I know it will be used
-Bring lunch
-Bring coffee from home
-Short showers with enforcement
-Run the dishwasher when full (mine actually uses less than my handwashing!)
-Never use the oven for one thing...it all goes at once and I stagger temps
-Buy things for a lifetime, not just today, even when it costs substantially more
-Correct land use purchases (shade grown for coffee, sustainable agri..etc)
-My car is 12 years old and still gets 25 mpg even with a big sport engine..whoohoo. (this is something of a joke since I'm a mil officer with a spot out front with the other commanders and mine is an old car and the rest are fancy)
-If I can fix it, I do, even if it is totally aggravating
-All errands are tagged onto a necessary route; like stopping to get milk on the way home, etc. No rides for no good reason.
-Compact flourescents everywhere I can put them.
-I have my own mesh shopping bags. (They are great for so many things besides that.)
There's more but those are all I can articulate at the moment.

[Ode]

There are a lot of really great suggestions here already, so I will only add the ones I haven't yet seen.

Many people don't know that you can compost natural fibers, such as cotton, wool, flax, hemp, and human hair! Your pet fur can compost too.

Used jeans will break down rather quickly, just remove the metal parts before adding them to your composter. Some people who keep worms can put these in the worm bins, the only thing that will be left at the end is a tangle of string from the seams. The worms will eat anything organic, with a few exceptions.

[hotzcatz]

We try to not buy anything retail although we do get some food items at retail prices. Saturday mornings are sacred to yard sales. We also try to produce as much of our own stuff as possible.

[Ken Scharabok]

On how little non-recyclable household trash I produce in a year I wasn't kidding. I can't remember the last time I took a my own household trash bag to the county dumpster center. I have at least a month to go on my current can. And, if I had compost pile, a lot of what does go into it would go into there.

But then I am single. I very, very seldom eat take-out from fast food places. When I do, most of the containers end up recycled in one manner or another.

Butter containers and such usually spend a couple of more years in the shop as storage containers. Only when they start to break/crack do they go into recycling.

County doesn't recycle glass. What I do is to have a 5-gallon plastic bucket in the shop. I break up the containers using a sledge hammer dropped on them. Glass may still go to landfill, but the volume will be way less.

Small boxes, say instant rice, are either used for outgoing eBay shipments or are flattened and put in with the newspapers.

I like Cup-o'-Soup. Nice little snack. Lid goes with newspapers. I rinse/wash out the styrofoam cup, breaks it up and it becomes packaging cushioning in a future shipment.

And, I REALLY don't consider myself a fanatic. Old saying is 80% of results come with the first 20% of effort. I would say I'm maybe at 90% with 50% effort.

[insocal]

With respect to plastics:
#1 - Reduce - I make a special effort not to buy anything made of plastic where there is an alternative, and not buy things packaged in plastic. If I do, I choose packaging with the triangle symbol on it.
#2 - Reuse - self-explanatory. Plastic grocery bags get used again for disposal of cat litter scoopings. Ziplocs bags get washed reused almost indefinitely, as do plastic food bags for my homemade baked goods.
#3 - Recycle - We are lucky here in Los Angeles - first it was single family homes and now it includes apartments and condos - everybody who wants can get as many "blue bins" as they want for pickup of recyclables (paid for by a teeny weeny fee in our power/water bill). We can recycle any plastics with a triangle and number on them, and I need to check again but we might be able to recycle ALL plastics. I know they take the plastic grocery bags. Then they also take bottles, cans, food jars, metals, aluminum foil, block styrofoam packaging, and of course all manner of paper as long as it's clean. We are on track to divert 70% of the city's waste from the landfill (yard waste is picked up in the "green bins) in just a few more years.

[insocal]

I recently read a very interesting and enlightening book called Garbageland - I forget the author's name. It deals with how we manage to generate so much waste in the first place, and when you throw stuff away (or recycle), where it actually goes.

Highly recommended.

Oh, and I got it through Paperbackswap.com, lol. The ultimate in re-use.

[shellrow]

All of my newspapers get shredded and put in the compost pile. Cardboard and shredded computer paper gets put in the garden along the walkways and later will be used in the chicken house when we get chickens! Plastic bags get used for trash bags for the smaller bathroom trash cans. My county has a horrible recycling center. They do not encourage recycling what so ever! However, the county my mama and daddy live in has a great program. I take the tin cans from soups, veggies, etc, as well as all of the plastic to take to her county. I only purchase soda in cans these days so that I can recycle those and make a lil extra $ to boot.