March 25th, 2009
NatureMill Makes Indoor Composting Easy
Stumble it!
The NatureMill Indoor composter is the ideal gadget for any ecowarrior without a yard or garden. The composter allows you to recycle your waste food easily and quickly. You can compost up to 120 lbs (55kg) of waste per month using the indoor composter!
The composter mixes and heats the waste, as well as adding moisture to encourage the breakdown of food matter. Once the food waste has broken down, you can then retrieve the compost from the bottom container of the composter.
The heat kills nasty bacteria and destroys the majority of smells. If you do smell anything from the composter, the worst you’d smell would be damp straw or mushrooms. The carbon filter inside the composter helps with the odors and only needs replacing every 5 years. Although the composter is always switched on, it only uses 5kWh a month, which costs very little in real money. Just pence really.
If you live in an flat (or apartment as they’re called in the US), then the NatureMill Indoor composter is a perfect way to reduce your landfill waste even if you don’t have a garden. The composter is small enough to fit in a kitchen cupboard, or could be stored in your garage if you have one. You can use the newly created soil to top-up your indoor plants with some natural fertilizer.
And here’s the best bit about the composter. Due to the way the waste is mixed and aerated, the decomposing material releases no methane into the atmosphere. This means you can do your bit to help reduce greenhouse gasses too!
This guest article about the NatureMill indoor composter was written by Dan Harrison. Dan has a passion for all kinds of eco-friendly gadgets. Dan also runs DailyEcoTips.com where you can read a new eco tip every day!
Popularity: 6% [?]
March 11th, 2009
Pizza Box and Other Recycling Mysteries Solved!
Even for the most eco-minded among us there are often lingering questions when it comes to recycling. “Can I put that used pizza box in the recycling bin?” is a big one. Also, “Do I need to rinse that plastic tub or that glass jar?” is another common one. Let’s get to the bottom of these mysteries, shall we?
Thanks to Earth911.com, they have solved the pizza box puzzle for us in a recent excellent piece on that topic. I knew that you can throw out clean cardboard, but you can’t throw out a pizza box that has cheeze and sauce remnants on it. But I didn’t know WHY– and now you can too! Here’s the scoop:
“Food is one of the worst contaminants in the paper recycling process. Grease and oil are not as big of a problem for plastic, metal and glass, as those materials are recycled using a heat process. But when paper products, like cardboard, are recycled, they are mixed with water and turned into a slurry. Since we all know water and oil don’t mix, the issue is clear.”
So if you are able to rip out the parts with food trash on them, then good on you. If not, sadly that cheesy box needs to go in the trash. So sad.
Now on to the rinse-out questions. Keep in mind that glass and metal are both more recyclable than plastic– with plastic you have to check the numbers on the containers and make sure your local recycling accepts those types of plastic.) For both glass and metal: you do not have to clean the heck out of them before throwing them in your bin. You also don’t have to remove labels. The heat used in the recycling process deals with contaminants easily– and you get to save water!
For plastic you do need to rinse it more thoroughly. Oils and food debris foul up the plastic recycling process. So give those tubs a good rinse– and do a particularly good job if there are cleaning or hazardous materials in there.
What about recycling Styrofoam? Earth911.com has done an excellent piece on this as well– read about recycling Styrofoam here. As you guessed, it’s not an easy answer. It depends on where you live– in Los Angeles for instance we can toss our clean Styrofoam right in our recycling bin. But that is definitely not the case in a lot of cities. As always, you need to check with your municipal waste service for clear recycling guidelines.
Click here to read our full recycling guide– it covers batteries, paint, and much more. Or if you’re looking for a recycling center in your area, search our nationwide database of recycling centers. Thank you for all of your hard work to recycle to the max!
Popularity: 3% [?]
January 16th, 2009
Eat Chips, Save Trash: One L.A. Guy’s Almost Zero-waste Year
Think hardcore environmentalism requires living like a monk? Not if you ask Dave Chameides, a steadicam operator living in L.A. who collected all his trash for a year and blogged about the project. Dave created less trash in all of 2008 than an average American family throws out in a week. And more impressively, he achieved this eco-feat while drinking beer and eating potato chips.
“I didn’t want to change the way that I was living my life,” Dave says. “If I wanted to drink beer, I wasn’t going to say, well, I can’t find a way to drink beer without creating packaging, so therefore I’m not going to. Instead, what I’m going to do is look at the packaging in beer and pick the most ‘eco-friendly’ way to do it.”
The idea behind Dave’s project was to focus on things people could do without drastically changing their entire lifestyle. “There are definitely people out there who have done similar things where they’ve cut everything out of their life,” Dave says. “A lot of people who are really really hardcore have emailed me and said, ‘You know, you can just not eat potato chips.’ Well, yeah, but I wanna eat potato chips!”
So Dave opted for bigger bags of chips versus the more wasteful one-serving bags — and cut out packaging wherever he could. Buying used items on Craigslist, composting food and paper scraps in his worm bin, and shopping at the farmers’ market — where he could even take back his egg cartons to a farmer for reuse — helped downsize Dave’s trash pile.
In the end, Dave amassed just 30.5 pounds of non-recyclable trash. That wasn’t the only stuff he piled up in his garage though — Dave decided to keep his recyclables for the year too, to show that “recycling isn’t the answer.”
“If you look at the majority of the waste that I put out there, it’s recycling,” Dave says. “That’s gonna take energy, it’s going to take resources, it’s going to take all sorts of things. I think we’ve been trained in the U.S. to think that recycling is the answer. But statistically, only 10% of everything that can be recycled is recycled.”
Plus, recycling tends to be a loosely used term, according to Dave. “Take plastic water bottles. they’re not actually recycled, they’re downcycled. They’re turned into park benches and plastic wood and things like that. Recycling is turning something back into itself. With plastic water bottles, you need relatively virgin plastic resin, so as far as the next generation of plastic bottles goes, recycling’s not doing anything.” Recycling’s still better than sending things to the landfill, but isn’t a guilt-free eco-parctice, Dave says.
Takin’ Out The Trash from Sustainable Dave on Vimeo.
See Dave display all the trash he amassed in the short video above. The trash-collecting experiment ended Dec. 31, 2008, but Dave expects most of the habits he picked up during the year to remain permanent. “I got rid of all my junk mail — I’m not going to go back to having junk mail, obviously!” Dave says. He’ll also keep taking his own bag to the farmer’s market — and even taking sugar packet wrappers home to feed to the worm composter.
And Dave’s collected trash is going to become a permanent fixture too — at the Museum of Trash in Hartford, Conn., which will put Dave’s 30.5 lbs of nonrecyclable trash on exhibit later this month. Dave’s recyclables are going to become art as well, thanks to an artist in Seattle who wants to pulverize everything then create something new out of the remains.
What are Dave’s plans for 2009? He’s working on a book called 365 Days of Solutions, teaching eco-seminars, and working at a new job as the director of sustainability at a local school. You can follow Dave’s eco-journey and get tips to craft your own at sustainabledave.org.
Photo courtesy Dave Chameides
Popularity: 4% [?]
