Change the World Wednesday – 3rd Sep

Birthday week is over.

Downloading Birthday 64

 

The last of the BBQ – tending old bread used for yummy garlic bread

I managed a greenish BBQ on the Saturday.

Basically only bones and food scraps went out in the rubbish. We used no ‘one use’ products. It turned out I had enough plates, and I have plenty of glasses, mostly saved from cheese spreads, and then there’s my wine glasses.

Wine bottles went out yesterday for recycle collection.

Sunday lunch was salad made from BBQ left overs, Monday’s was the same. Yesterday, I grated the last of the cucumber and chopped the half tomato and some shredded cabbage with grated cheese and chopped celery sticks then mixed in two eggs to make vege fritters.

Total actual vege waste… looks like the last vestiges of cabbage will end up in the compost (it’s getting furry) along with scraps from the preparation of the salads.

You can read report of BBQ here.

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This week’s CTWW is Zero Waste Week.

This week, look for one more way to reduce the amount of waste you generate. Need some inspiration? Check out the Zero Waste Week Facebook Page and scroll through the posts for tips and ideas. Perhaps buy “naked” produce (items without any kind of packaging), carry a reusable bag at the market, or find creative uses for leftover food. If you have a baby in the house, try cloth diapers (nappies) and reusable wipes rather than the disposable varieties. Consider reusable menstrual products instead of single-use items. Find creative ways to upcycle “trash” or donate used items to charity. The idea, this week, is to find one more way to reduce waste..

.This week, I actually brought rubbish home.

Empty land becomes a local dump

Behind the recently complete apartment development is a plot of land. Brazilians use these as an informal  local dump. This area was cleaned by Comlurb (the council rubbish service) just over a week ago. Already it has entulho (building and demoliton waste), cut trees, and old furniture. Brazilians don’t have access to council dumping areas; they’re too far away, and many don’t have cars, and even less have cars with trailers.

Last week, Thursday on the way to work, I found a white cabinet. On the way home I lugged it home. The next day I went back to inspect what appeard to be a broken, relatively new wardrobe (closet). I took two of the larger pieces home (two trips, a walking stick does hamper one).

You can read about what I did and see photos on No Moaning Today.

So saving rubbish can be considered ‘no waste’….

Yesterday for the recycle collection, I put out glass, plastic, polystyrene and cardboard. The Yucky rubbish went out for the regular collection later.

So far today, it’s 2am, my rubbish has one milk carton, one plastic detergent bottle (both recyclable) and a coffee bag (sack). Now the coffee bag, I don’t honestly know if it’s plastic or some type of foil, or both, so it goes in the yucky rubbish along with a few scraps from my dinner plate..

Really, I don’t have much rubbish. I do try on a daily basis to control what I put out for the landfill collection.

I’ll never achieve Zero Waste, I know that, but I am conscious of what I chuck.

The celery I bought for the BBQ, none wasted, not even the base.

The base of the celery

It’s in a pot with some water and it is already sprouting, once it’s established, I’ll plant it. So in the future when I need celery, I won’t need to buy a whole plant, just pluck what I need growing outside the kitchen

The suggestions in the Zero Waste challenge.

• It’s very hard to find ‘naked’ produce here. I know of one shop where I can get some items, particularly spices and some bulk stuff like ketchup. But they don’t have bulk sugar, flour, etc; the stuff I need.
• Creative food ideas, see above the challenge; I do that.
• Upcycling trash, yup, I do that too.

Remember a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had a number of old PC items, keyboards and mice and my old cellphone that I was looking for a way to dispose of responsibly. Turns out that the weekly recyclable collection accepts these items too. I also collected a video player and DVD player from the regular rubbish, hopeful that they may be useful, if not I can dispose of them correctly and now they won’t finish up in the landfill as they would have.

Now, it’s back to bed, and hopefully to sleep.

 

Monday Moaning

This is not so much a moan, but a real bitch.

This post is about kids who have nothing, and I mean nothing. They live in a rubbish dump slum at Cateura outside Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

When I look at kids in the western world and all they have, then I am faced with kids who have nothing and make the most of it.

This music is rubbish!

Could this play music?

It’s made from rubbish, the stops are bottle caps…

What about these?

Violins…

Now watch this video.

Isn’t that awesome?

It goes to show that we in the west who have so much, really know so little.

You can read more about the Recycled Orchestra on Anita’s Notebook, it’s in English.

Nature Ramble

Nice story today. Recovering wasteland.

David Attenborough opens Essex nature reserve built on London’s waste

Thurrock Thameside nature park, which rests on a rubbish dump, has been officially opened by Sir David Attenborough

Tarnya Carter and John Hall of the Essex Wildlife Trust, at Mucking Landfill Site which is being transformed into a wildlife habitat and public park. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Thurrock Thameside nature park has the look of a classic wildlife reserve. Perched on the Essex coastline on the Thames estuary, it covers 120 acres of grass, bramble and shrub. It is home to barn owls, brown hares, harvest mice, great crested newts, yellow wagtails, reed buntings, adders and various orchids. It is, in short, a haven for nature lovers.

The site has one unusual feature, however: it rests on a thick bed of rubbish and domestic waste that has been dumped by six London boroughs over the past 50 years and which, in places, has piled up to form layers that are 30m thick. It is a strange bedrock for a nature reserve to say the least.

It is a certainly remarkable transformation. And yesterday, the Essex nature park – awarded an ethical award by the Observer in 2011 – was given a great accolade: Sir David Attenborough conducted the official opening. “We live in a crowded country and need to respect its limits to sustain us,” he said at the opening ceremony. “Change like this must become the norm.”

This point was backed by John Hall, chief executive of Essex Wildlife Trust, which has played a key role in turning the giant rubbish dump into a wildlife refuge. “This was an old gravel pit and once excavations were finished it was used as a vast dump for London’s domestic rubbish,” he said. “Every day, barges of the stuff were brought up the Thames and dumped. The only wildlife we had were gulls – thousands of them. They used to go through the rubbish for food. They would drag waste out then spread it round the area. Local people would find they had dropped rotting chicken bones in their garden.”

It was a very different vision yesterday. Skylarks – whose numbers are declining alarmingly elsewhere – were singing while several adders were spotted by visitors. “Adders are very shy, which suggests there is now a healthy population at Thurrock,” Hall said. “That in turn, indicates healthy numbers of their prey, creatures such as voles. The presence of these animals also explains significant numbers of peregrines and barn owls.”

But creating this haven from a rubbish tip – carried out by the wildlife trust and the landfill company Cory Environmental – has not been easy. First the rubbish had to be compacted. Then a thick layer of clay, known as a pie-crust, was placed over this vast sea of waste. This has since been covered in soil on which grass, bushes and wildlife have established themselves.

“So far we have 120 acres fully restored,” said Hall. “There are a further 400 acres we will take over once they have been covered with soil and plants. We also plan to take over some other local land so that we will have a reserve of more than 800 acres here in the near future, one of our biggest.”

For good measure, the reserve is also generating power for the electricity grid. The methane created by the rotting foodstuffs at its core is collected and burned to drive 15 turbines that will provide enough electricity to power 100,000 homes for the next 30 years.

Where there’s Mucking, there’s grass: For 50 years an old quarry was a giant rubbish dump. Now it’s a thriving nature reserve

An Essex landfill site which once took 15 per cent of all London’s rubbish has been ingeniously transformed into a nature reserve. The tip, full to a depth of 30 metres with the capital’s garbage, was first covered with earth and then turned into grassland. Here, and in adjacent wetland and wooded areas, hundreds of rare species now thrive.

Instead of the drone of machinery bringing in tons of detritus there is the song of skylarks. In place of the whine of the ubiquitous gulls, there are barn owls, little owls and short-eared owls, waders, cuckoos, and the melodies of nightingales. And where there was only the sight and smell of fermenting rubbish, there are orchids and the rare bees that sip from their flowers. Water voles are here in numbers, too, plus slow-worms, common lizards and an estimated 500 adders.

Thus has the wonderfully named Mucking Landfill miraculously become the Thurrock Thameside Nature Park…

Read more

 

Short-eared Owl. EWT Thameside Nature Park, Thurrock. 19th February 2013. Photo by Denis Tuck.

 

The stunning waxwing bird has been sighted in Essex this winter, and the charity, which has bases at Chafford Gorges Nature Reserve and Thameside Nature Park – image Thurrock Gazette

 

Turning Brazilian Trash into Fuel

FirmGreen’s Biogas cleaning equipment is loaded up at Guild Associates for ultimate delivery to Brazil.

California-based FirmGreen, Inc. is set to export the 4th and final shipment of its proprietary biogas cleaning equipment to Rio De Janiero, in preparation for turning dirty landfill gas into clean, renewable fuel.

FirmGreen, Inc. (FirmGreen®) a technology leader in the renewable energy field, has prepared its final shipment of proprietary biogas cleaning equipment for export to Brazil, setting the stage for the installation phase of the project. The Brazilian based project sponsor is Gás Verde, SA and the completed plant will clean biogas from the nearby Novo Gramacho landfill for sale to a local oil refinery owned and operated by Petrobras, the largest company in Latin America and the eighth largest energy company in the world.

The final shipment of FirmGreen equipment, mostly manufactured at Guild Associates in Dublin, Ohio, and shipped in installments over the past 11 months, has been loaded onto 16 trucks and is enroute to the Port of Jacksonville, Florida, where it will be shipped to the Port of Rio de Janeiro. Upon arrival in Brazil by late May, the equipment will be transported to the Gás Verde biogas purification plant at the Novo Gramacho landfill for assembly. By fall 2012, FirmGreen expects to begin operation of its patented CO₂ wash process at the Gás Verde facility to convert landfill gas into clean, biomethane fuel, with an energy content equivalent to natural gas. Gás Verde will then inject the clean biogas, sold under FirmGreen’s trademark of gCNG®, into a pipeline 3.7 miles long to the local Petrobras refinery. Petrobras plans to use the gCNG to generate over 10 percent of the thermal energy needed to run its Duque de Caxias Refinery….

….About the Novo Gramacho Landfill

The Novo Gramacho landfill was the setting for part of the Waste Land movie which follows artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from Brooklyn to his native Brazil and to Novo Gramacho, the world’s largest managed landfill, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film won more than twenty international awards, and was also a 2011 Academy Awards® Best Documentary Feature Nominee.

Source: PRWeb Read more

Vultures and scavengers at Jardim Gramacho, the largest open air landfill in Latin America

I think the story above is wrong, it was not Novo Gramacho, but Jardim Gramacho in the film, but…

Jardim Gramacho is on the verge of being decommissioned.

People collect recyclable materials from Jardim Gramacho municipal landfill where the documentary “Lixo Extraordinario,” or “Waste Land,” was filmed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Feb. 10.