Blagger » Recycling

Saving grey water at home

Nik — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:16:44 +0000

The latest tool in our drive for self-sufficiency is deceptively simple. It’s a funnel. A big one, granted, but a simple funnel nonetheless that we bought on the market at the weekend.

We’re using it to fill two watering cans with all the water we use in the kitchen sink, and it’s quite an eye-opening exercise. Despite having two watering cans sitting out in the outhouse ready for all our tip-aways, we’re having to empty them onto the plants a couple of times a day each just to keep up with the supply.

It’s shocking how much water we used to tip away just because we’d used it to wash our hands or rinse some vegetables, and although we’re not doing this to save money it is obviously going to have quite an impact on the water bill when most of our vegetables are now watered from either the water butt (free water) or second hand water from the kitchen (already paid for once).

The tomatoes have never been watered so often in their lives.

I can’t recommend saving grey water strongly enough. It’s maybe the best recycling move we have ever made. I’m a convert.

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Eco answers

Nik — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:45:49 +0000

The more you use, the more you pay. Whether it’s electricity, water or packaging, everything we consume costs us money somewhere along the line. For anyone who grows their own food in an effort to cut down on packaging, saves rainwater to save wasting precious supplies or generates their own electricity to trim their bills – in short, a self-sufficientist – this is patently clear.

But how much does waste actually cost, and how much can you save by going green?

It’s never been obvious or easy to work out, but the New Scientist has produced a guide to ‘dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask‘, and it answers plenty of them.

Like switching off lights. I’d always been told that it was best to leave a strip light on all evening rather than turn it on and off every time you enter or leave a room. And the magazine seems to agree, applying the theory to the energy saving bulbs we use throughout the house:

Switching the light on and off does saves energy, but there is a catch. Every time you flip the switch, the bulb takes a jolt of electricity, which shortens its life. Studies by the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, found that turning low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs on and off at frequent intervals can shorten their lifespan by as much as 75 per cent. The institute’s director of energy utilisation, Tom Reddoch, suggests leaving energy-saving bulbs on if you will be out of the room for less than 15 minutes.

It’s got advice for drivers, too. That’s less relevant for us these days as neither of us uses the car much and we do most of our shopping for fresh food by bike, but even so:

Avoid dramatic braking and acceleration and use cruise control if you’ve got it. Move through the gears as quickly as possible, changing up before you hit 2500 revs per minute (2000 rpm for a diesel). Where possible, drive at a steady 55 miles per hour (90 kilometres per hour). It is up to 20 per cent more fuel-efficient than driving at 75 mph. Check your tyre pressure once a month because underinflated tyres can raise fuel consumption by 6 per cent. Don’t carry excess baggage. Each extra 25 kilograms decreases fuel efficiency by 1 per cent. And avoid short trips – a cold engine uses twice as much fuel as a warm one.

It’s an excellent read for anyone who wants to know how to make best use of limited resources, so if you’re wondering whether a home wind turbine will ever pay its way, if washing your clothes at lower temperatures will really get them clean or what the carbon footprint of your cycle ride to work is, based on the energy consumption involved in making the food that will power your little pumping legs, check out the full article here.

Water recycling… extreme

Nik — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:38:03 +0000

Even in space you have to recycle. In fact, particularly in space; you can’t just pop out to the shops after all.

That’s why Nasa has been filling up the space station’s water tanks with the liquid that comes off the shuttle’s electrical system. It’s safe to drink, and it provides the astronauts with all they need. The trouble is, the shuttle is only scheduled to make another 10 flights. Ever. And then it’ll be retired. That’s a problem for the space station as it’ll mean the end of its regular stream of water.

So the next time they head up they’re taking a water recycling unit that will extract and recycle water from the station’s two toilets and the moisture in the air. And when it’s been recycled, the astronauts will be drinking it all over again.

According to Reuters:

NASA expects to process about six gallons (23 litres) of water per day with the new device. The goal is to recover about 92 percent of the water from the crew’s urine and moisture in the air.

One day we’ll probably have this kind of thing in our homes, but not right now. The kit costs £169.7m.

It tastes fine, apparently, and at that price you’d hope it would. Reuters again:

‘We did blind taste tests of the water,’ said NASA’s Bob Bagdigian, the system’s lead engineer. ‘Nobody had any strong objections. Other than a faint taste of iodine, it is just as refreshing as any other kind of water.’

‘I’ve got some in my fridge,” he added. “It tastes fine to me.’

Recycle your Christmas cards

Nik — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:50:00 +0000

Tonight is 12th night, so it’s time to take down your decorations and cards. That leaves you with the question of what to do with all those greetings now the festive season is over.

In theory you could drop them into your cardboard recycling bag, but it would be far better to have them recycled by the Woodland Trust. It wants to process 100 million cards by the end of the month and, in the process, raise enough money to plant 24,000 trees.

By gathering in and recycling your cards the Trust earns recycling credits from local authorities who pass on the savings they make in not having to tip your unwanted cardboard into a landfill. It also receives donations from some councils and supporters, and is given a chunk of cash by the scheme’s four commercial partners, WHSmith, Tesco, TK Maxx, Marks and Spencer (each of which takes in your cards and passes them to the Trust) and the Recycle Now campaign.

If you’re wondering why this is such an important issue, bear in mind that paper and card makes up around a fifth of all waste put into domestic dustbins, and that at the end of every Christmas season around a billion Christmas cards end up there.

So don’t throw them away: give them to the Woodland Trust and help turn all that waste cardboard back into trees.

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recycling, christmas+cards, woodland+trust, waste

Recycling too far

Nik — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:32:54 +0000

I’m all for reusing where possible, and grey water is a big waste area, but I don’t think I could bring myself to organise the plot’s water requirements along the lines suggested by this book.

I found it in Foyles at lunchtime and it’s very comprehensive, even going to great lengths to explain the kind of urinals you can get for women so that they, too, can collect their liquid gold.

Regardless of the fact that foxes and cats probably urinate on a vegetable plot from time to time, and that urine is generally very clean and sterile, I don’t think I could enjoy my vegetables if they’d been fed this way. Neither could I feed them to my friends.

If you could, Liquid Gold: the Lore and Logic of using Urine to Grow Plants can be found on Amazon (£4.49) and second hand on AbeBooks (from £1.82).

Technorati Tags:
garden, gardening, self sufficiency, recycling

Recycled furniture

Nik — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:59:42 +0000

I discovered at the weekend that you don’t have to buy from eBay to get your hands on recycled furniture. You can actually buy recycled new.

On a trip to Braintree to buy a new mattress for the spare bed (the last one got thrown out after eight years’ use and a further year of being slept on by my tenants) I dropped into a furniture store on the off-chance it was selling anything that might be right for the house.

My expectations were low: I’ve spent the last few weekends looking at furniture and the suitable items are few and far between.

And yet there in the foyer was just the thing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was clearly what I’d been after all along.

A table, four chairs and a bench, all made from reclaimed teak. On a fairly good offer, and ready for delivery in a month or so when the house will hopefully be in some kind of order. The chairs were comfortable, the table just the right size, and the bench could be swapped for another two seats for a premium of just £50.

What really appealed, though, was the wood. Teak is a hardwood, and as such it’s slow to grow and you shouldn’t really go chopping it down. Using reclaimed teak, though, gets around that issue, and as a bonus you end up with a wonderfully irregular and slightly worn piece of furniture. The colours are slightly random, and there are a few little bumps here and there, all of which add to the character.

It wasn’t cheap, so buying reclaimed wood clearly fails on one half of the blagger charter (low-cost living), but as it didn’t cost any trees their lives it has green credentials by the bucketload.

And here it is:

Money for mobiles

Nik — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:27:14 +0000

Like 10m other Brits did last year, I’ve just upgraded my phone. Partly it was because I wanted a new handset, but primarily it was because Orange was offering a better deal than Vodafone, and it would save me money to switch.

In the end I stayed where I was, as they matched the deal, but as they also gave me a snazzy new Sony Ericsson it means I now have a redundant mobile sitting around at home.

Mobiles are very harmful to the environment if you simply chuck them out, as the battery needs to be property disposed of, and the etched components recycled in an appropriate manner. So, I was pleased to see that when they sent me my new handset, the box packers had also slipped in a postage-paid return envelope, so I could send back my old one. Once they got their hands on it, they’d forward it on to the Third World where it’ll enjoy a useful second life in the sun.

Admirable, yet not entirely enticing, as hanging onto it gives me a fallback should the new one go wrong, get lost or be stolen.

Then I came across envirophone. It pays you to take your phone off your hands, covers all the postage, makes a donation to charity and then recycles the phone, either by sending it on to needier countries, or disposing of it in the proper way.

For my old Sony Ericsson K750i, they’ll pay me £47 in cold, hard cash or, if I prefer, send me £54.05 to spend in Argos, which will come in handy with a house move on the horizon.

Suddenly, hanging on to that old mobile ‘just in case’ doesn’t seem nearly so tempting, while for anyone pondering a paid-for upgrade, where their next mobile won’t be free, a service like this could effectively offset the full cost of a far better handset than the one they already have, depending on the contract they have in mind.

Batteries and the environment

Nik — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 07:19:15 +0000

I arrived at work this morning to find my mouse out of action. It’s wireless, so doubtless far more wasteful than a cable-connected pointer, what with the need for the transmitting and receiving parts, and a whole second element plugged into the back of my Mac. Fortunately I don’t feel too guilty about that, as it was sent in for review and nobody asked for it back, so it’s not entirely my fault.

Some quick diagnosis quickly proved that the batteries were flat. Apart from this mouse, the only battery-powered possessions I own are my GPS receiver and the remote for my radio, so I rarely have cause to buy any. Now that I do, though, I started to wonder how green using this kind of mouse might actually be. In fact, how green are batteries in general?

They’re not.

Treehugger reported last week on a newly-published Australian study which revealed that 80% of the environmental cost of batteries – both disposable and rechargable – is incurred in the initial manufacturing process, transportation and shelf-stocking in a shop.

Clearly rechargables only inflict this environmental bruise once, and can then be recharged several hundred times for just the cost of the raw power you’re pumping in. Better still, if you buy NiMH cells, rather than NiCad, you eliminate cadmium from the production cycle altogether.

Cadmium is a particularly nasty chemical element, which if not properly looked after can cause almost as much damage to humans as it can to the environment. As Wikipedia explains:

[T]here have been notable instances of toxicity as the result of long-term exposure to cadmium in contaminated food and water. In the decades following World War II, Japanese mining operations contaminated the Jinzu River with cadmium and traces of other toxic metals. Consequently, cadmium accumulated in the rice crops growing along the riverbanks downstream of the mines. The local agricultural communities consuming the contaminated rice developed Itai-itai disease and renal abnormalities, including proteinuria and glucosuria. Cadmium and several cadmium-containing compounds are known carcinogens and can induce many types of cancer.

As more and more of the electronic gadgets we use in daily life – iPods, mobile phones and the like – ship with batteries that are designed to last the whole of their natural lives, this will become less of a problem, but rather than buying replacement batteries for this mouse I’ll be heading up into the loft tonight to dig out the battery charger that kept me in power throughout my teenage years, when I recycled my AAs for financial, rather than ecological reasons, and in the meantime plugging an old-fashioned cable-tied pointer pusher at work.

How to get a discount at Starbucks

Nik — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:31:19 +0000

We’re pretty good at doing green in the office. All our waste paper is recycled, of course, and in 2006 we sent 28,160 kg of paper that way, saving the equivalent of 341 trees and 118,300 kWh of energy. Whether those trees were bonsai or giant sequoia, I don’t know, but we did win an award.

After Christmas there was a scheme to get us all bringing in our festive cards and sending them off for planet-friendly pulping, and in the next few months we’ll introduce can and CD recycling. It all makes for a nicer place to work.

Perhaps the best move of the last year, though, was to buy proper reusable metal cutlery for the kitchens. For several years, the well-stocked kitchens on every floor were kitted out with three large cardboard boxes. Each one would hold a couple of thousand spoons, forks or knives; all plastic and destined to be dispatched to the dustbin after a single use.

The moment their metal replacements arrived, they disappeared, and haven’t been back. Initial concerns that we’d have too few proper utensils to go around proved unfounded, and we’re a greener, better place as a result.

Now Bring Your Own is hoping to do the same in the wider world, as it encourages us to carry around proper metal knives, forks and spoons, fabric napkins and shopping bags, and proper cups or mugs that you’d use in a cafe in place of a paper or plastic disposable. Camping kit would be ideal here.

It’s a US initiative, and is already paying dividends with some outlets – Starbucks being a notable and commendable example – actually offering a discount to anyone who provides their own mug for filling.

Sadly, without some wide-ranging publicity I can’t imagine that anyone bringing their own mug to a coffee chain over here would be treated with anything but scepticism, and sadly a click through Starbucks’ UK site reveals no mention of any similar scheme.

However, I emailed Starbucks’ UK customer care team to see what the official line was, and it’s good news. The response:

We do offer a discount of 10p if people bring in their own travel mugs.

We appreciate you getting in touch and look forward to welcoming you back soon to your local Starbucks.

So, a big hand to Starbucks for taking a lead here. Let’s hope it starts to push this scheme in-store, without waiting for us to ask.