We’ve talked many times in the past about composting with worms, the commercial options and the DIY options, previous articles can be found here. Frankly, worms are great but not suited to everyone and every situation, so for those of you wishing to enter the wonderful world of composting there is always bokashi.
I would hazard a guess that a lot renters are like us and don’t have access to a car, this often makes getting rid of (or should I say passing on or recycling) unwanted goods quite difficult and you you generally end up waiting a year until the next hard rubbish collection. Not only does this clutter up your already small property but most council dumps’ green credentials can’t be relied upon either.
Enter Green Collect, an excellent service that collects and recycles many of your unwated items and even employs staff from disadvantaged backgrounds, so really, there’s nothing to lose!
If you have other items to be collected, some other good resources are:
http://www.phoenixfridges.org.au/
http://www.greenpc.com.au/
http://computerbank.org.au/
http://www.zoo.org.au/Calling_on_You
People are incredibly sentimental about gift giving and card sending at Christmas. Even as they grow older, many people are miffed, disturbed or shocked by the idea of buying people gifts. Many are even worse about Christmas cards
Do you send Christmas cards? Do you give gifts? For whom? Why?
Some thoughts on Christmas cards
Why use them?
We tend not to bother at all. Greeting cards and gift tags are abundant in almost every household over the festive season.
pic via here
They represent an investment in energy, water and raw materials – so choosing wisely can minimise their environmental impact
We generally send Christmas cards to let people know we are thinking of them in the ‘holiday’ seasons. What’s wrong with a thoughtful phone call? Or failing that, an SMS? Since the advent of SMS I’ve been getting at least 15 SMS messages from friends all around the world on Christmas Day, not to mention all the ones complaining about their family members.
For a more personal touch we tend to make web cam videos with a brief greeting which we send to friends and family overseas. Not those kind of videos! Just us saying Merry Christmas and whatever else we can think of. Much easier than attempting neat handwriting after a year of typing!
If you must buy some, look for those made from recycled materials. You can often find ones made locally where the proceeds of their sales go to various charities. Visit Planet Ark for info about recycling in the festive season.
You can also buy or make some re-use Christmas card labels so you can re-use this year’s cards next Christmas. You could add a couple with any card you send so that they in turn can be reused again.
In regard to gift tags to stick onto presents I find it’s easiest to just make my own. These were made from some left over paint chips.
Ways to reduce gift giving
By arrangement everyone puts all the names into a hat and only has to give one gift each, kris krindle style.
Offer people a homemade meal in the new year rather than a gift.
Make a donation to charity on the person’s behalf. Especially if they are someone who has everything anyway.
Organise a swap party at your workplace of previous unwanted gifts you’ve recieved that you haven’t had the opportunity to throw away.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be featuring a range of easy tutorials for gifts you can make for friends and family. We’ll also be looking at why you should be locally, buy ethically and buy handmade.
In this day and age phonebooks are surely one of the biggest wastes of resources around… A huge wad of paper full of contacts you could find on the Internet, ferried around in cars and trucks that most people never even look at.
When our last phonebook was delivered I happened to bump into the delivery guy and told him we didn’t want a copy, he informed me that he would just give it to me anyway, to which I shrugged and put it straight into the recycling bin… A complete waste!
I came across a few well organised campaigns against phone books in the USA and UK, mainly all trying to convince the government to make phone books opt in, not opt out.
www.banthephonebook.org for the US
www.saynotophonebooks.com and www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2251134/hang-phone-book for the UK
So I wondered what campaigns, actions and options might be happening in Australia..
I found one useful post here that also holds some interesting debates on the issue.
So far I could only find one option, apparently you can ring Sensis (who make most of the main phone books) on 1800 810 211 to opt out (more details can be found here), but that might not even be possible, it seems the only way to actually guarantee not receiving a phone book is to not have a land line…
Well, they’re pretty defunct these days to…
We all waste far too much food! Leftovers from other meals can easily be re-used in whole new meals, the wondrous baked beans can make any meal interesting and great again…
For more ideas take a look at this blog post from howstuffworks.
recipes.howstuffworks.com/fresh-ideas/easy-dinner-ideas/10-meals-to-make-from-leftovers.htm
Do you know how much water goes down the toilet everyday? Well, quite a bit… We’ve already bestowed the virtues of not needed to flush every time “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown wash it down“, lets take it one stage further, in our house we generate a fair amount of grey water from the shower and washing machine and don’t have a whole lot do with it, especially in wetter months, so putting two and two together, why not flush the toilet with it?
It sounds a little gross, but is very easy to do and it made me realise that even on a half flush the toilet uses around a bucket of water.
We’ll show you what we did, but your toilet may be different.
Firstly, turn the tap off that feeds water into the cistern, you can always turn it back on if you run out of grey water.
Take off the cistern’s lid, in our case there was a clip on both sides of the lid.
Pour your water in to the cistern (And I hazard a bet that most of yours look as manky as ours)
Flush, in our case it’s the lever below, left hand side for half flush, right hand side for full
Close the cistern and repeat as needed, easy!
It’s widely known that sell by dates and use by dates are more for guidance than accurate, with ever-sensitive-to-legal-cases retailers erring on the extreme side of caution, generally if it smells alright it can be kept and consumed, but if you need a little more guidance I came across this great website…
