Waste Disposal and Recycling

Waste Disposal and Recycling
1. Provide examples of how your design and/or current lifestyle implements each of the 5 R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Retrofit, Redesign)

Reduce: In our current setup we focus on trying, as much as possible, to implement these 5 R’s every day. Firstly we choose to not own or use a car. Its impact is huge on our environment and as we live in a well serviced city can substitute this for bicycles and bus transportation. Even the buses are being converted to hybrid vehicles where they run on natural gas and have a switch off/switch on system which lowers their fuel usage.

We continue to grow our staples (Potatoes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, onions) wherever we live and also experiment each year with different varieties. We try as much as possible to use non-hybridised heirloom seeds too as we can then seed save and “reuse” the saved seeds in forthcoming years. We also trade our seeds with others to ensure their ongoing success and survival.

If we need to shop and purchase from a store, we consciously choose products that use less packaging or choose products that we can reuse the packaging (glass jars etc) even going as far as keeping our takeaway food containers (on the rare occasion we do buy takeaway) as these plastic trays make excellent seed nurseries!

A tip that i find useful is when i buy something from a shop that is excessively packaged, I will, if possible, unwrap on site and leave the packaging for the store to dispose of. Hopefully this will make them think about what they sell!

Reuse: As mentioned above we do try to choose packaging that is reusable the easiest being glass jars and containers. We have taken to buying Kilner jars for their size, strength and utility. We have a basic if not all-encompassing ethos of buying stuff that can be decanted into existing containers. It vastly reduces our packaging waste coming into the house.

Recycle: The council provides recycling services in our area and will take all metal, plastic, paper/card and glass. We do have both a wormery and a composter so most of our organic waste is sorted out by those two pretty efficiently.

Retrofit: There are certainly opportunities for us to retrofit some appliances and fixture or fittings in our house, but it is a rental unit and requires permission from our landlord. Poor excuse granted, but it has prevented us from carrying out any retrofitting.

Redesign: By designing a human living habitat from scratch, it has given us the opportunity to consider redesigning our existing living conditions/setup to reduce our pollution impact. Our design project is only a hypothetical plan, but at least affords us the opportunity to test some redesign strategies that can later be applied to our current set of circumstances.

2. What aspects of your lifestyle contribute most to world pollution levels?

I can only think that the biggest impact that we have on our environment is our use of fossil fuels to heat our property and cook our food (Natural Gas) or our use of electricity which is primarily generated in the UK by coal and oil burning power stations. We have tried to ameliorate our impact by reducing our use of these sources as much as possible but are under no illusion that these aren’t damaging!

3. What are the top three causes of global warming?

Greed, ignorance and propaganda?

The three main causes of global warming are actually quite difficult to select. There are natural mechanisms that can cause the mean global temperature to increase such as methane gas release from bogs/swamps, arctic methane clathrates, melting permafrost (which traps methane when frozen) and ruminant digestion. Carbon dioxide increases due to volcanic activity or respiration, solar irradiance and water vapour increases in the atmosphere are all considered natural.

There are man-made causes of global warming that synthesise some of the above processes but cause an imbalance in the natural systems ability to absorb increased pollutants. Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial activity add giga-tonnes of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels, removal of carbon sinks by deforestation that no longer then sequester the carbon back into the natural cycle.

The difficult thing to assess is which are the three main causes of global warming. I would suggest that CO2 emissions from industrial activity would be the main culprit, methane release from feedback loops, ie as the temp increases the more methane released from previously frozen locations and thirdly removal of carbon sequestering plants (deforestation) would be my third choice.