Welcome to my backyard

Some pics for a change.

First up, my mostly-recycled chook pen... with a little addition on the near side which I'll get back to in a minute. The far end is the existing fence. Rear-left is a piece of lattice which some previous owner left lying around this place. Rear-right and the lower half of the front and front-left are rigid mesh fence pieces Mr S had in surplus. The gateway on the right used to be parts of Mr S's neighbour's verandah, while the gate frame itself is cut down from a wardrobe door which I hated. Underneath most of it are old hardwood sleepers which were somebody else's idea of garden borders. The only significant new material was the chicken wire to fill in the gaps above the fence panels and in the gate section.

The hutch doesn't look like much in this pic but by damn it was the hardest part of the job, and is also made from recycled materials. I'll post on it another day.



Right down there in front of the home for chooks is the home for my Jericho beans. Six little sprouts now have a chook-proof, well-nourished, sunny spot with lots of opportunity to climb. You can see in the previous pic the passionfruit vine which has its roots in the neighbour's yard. I'm enjoying that for now but will probably cut it back later on to make a bit more room for the beans. More recycled fence panel, a bit of the wood panel from that hated wardrobe door and even some old White Pages went into the construction of this bit. I confess to buying the compost from the hardware megastore today, but at least it's organic.







And finally, some proof that my back yard is actually capable of supporting some kind of useful plant life: our herb garden. Featured are basil, parsley, chives, chillis, rosemary, sage, marjoram, chickory, spring onions and - if you zoom in and look really carefully - a solitary coriander leaf. Yeah, the garden hasn't yet proved it can support coriander. We have some oregano on stand-by to take its place.

Heeeere, chook chook chooky!

We want chickens.
Chickens need somewhere safe to live and lay their eggs.
I avoid buying new materials.
I pretty much refuse to use concrete.
I use hand-powered tools whenever it's an option.
There was some junk lying around the yard and the shed.
My mate (Mr S) had some even cooler junk in his yard.
We're not stuck-up about the appearance of our garden.
It's a work in progress.
I'll post some pics once I complete the walls.

High Tech, Low Power and Less Nasty

I have deliberately kept my work and my blog separate. The high tech company I work for has a very strict policy about the way employees represent it in public and it's a line I never want to cross.

Suffice for me to say, my employer has just released a new model of ultra-portable no-compromise laptop computer. It has a full-size screen and keyboard, runs the full version of our latest operating system, uses a fully modern Intel processor... and according to the published specs has an average power consumption of just 8W. Yes I have a tradition of liking this company's products but that little stat particularly impressed me.

It's also nice to see attention given to things like the materials choices (making use of aluminium for its recycling value, eliminating PVCs and BFRs etc) and packaging (smaller packaging increases transport efficiency, materials also selected for recycling).

And the best thing is that it's not just my employer who's doing this - lots of other companies are making actual improvements in their environmental impact. I wonder how far they can go with it by 2050.

Free recycling for old computers: Oct 27-29

For my fellow residents of the Brisbane area.

A certain international computer company renowned for making lots of lots of stuff that people want to buy is running a free recycling program around the country for any old computers and related junk. Brisbane's turn is next month with six locations around the city open to take your unwanted stuff.

There are conditions on what's accepted but there are no strings attached. Full details online here.

Mulch ado about nothing

If you've read a few of my previous posts you'd hopefully know that I'm strongly in favour of reducing the amount of manufactured goods we purchase, selecting locally-made quality items when it's necessary to buy something and using my own muscles in preference to power tools. But sometimes the practicality of the situation is that you really don't have much choice.

This weekend I bought a mulcher. It was made in China, which is generally considered to have some of the worst industrial practices in the world in terms of environmental impact and social justice. It came in a box with styrofoam, plastic bags and bubble-wrap. Large portions of the product itself are made of plastic which is probably not recyclable. Oh, and it can use as much electricity in about two and half hours as the rest of the house does in a whole day (not counting hot water).

So what was I thinking?

Well there's a lot growing in our back yard including a couple of monster palm trees which drop enormous fronds on a regular basis. We have hibiscus bushes and on three sides a border of sheena's gold, all of which need to be trimmed frequently or they get out of hand. In order to make room for tank #1 I had to remove (by hand) one small tree and while I was at it I removed another (by hand) which had established itself in what is ostensibly the vege garden. Both of the trees, a half dozen fronds and a heap of prunings all piled together were starting to look like a fabulous snake refuge for the coming summer.

In rural areas and in times past, people would simply burn much of this material either as fuel or simply to get rid of it. That's not permitted in cities like Brisbane (for good reason). Here, this material is considered "waste" and so it is subjected to the same general rule which applies for other waste - it gets transported to a central waste transfer station and "processed". If I don't want my garden trimmings rotting in landfill I have to put them in a trailer and drive more than 15 minutes each way to drop them off myself - or pay somebody else to make the trip for me.

But I don't see this material as waste. It's a resource which I want to use here as compost or mulch. I tried for a while stripping the green leaves from the hibiscus prunings by hand so as to make a suitable material for compost, but in the end it just wasn't working. And how am I supposed to manually make mulch from those huge palm fronds?

In a bygone era there might have been mulching machines which could be powered by hand (or foot, or horse... or children). I very much doubt I could track one of those down these days. In the end there wasn't much choice. I had to go with what's available.

One aspect of the decision was easy: I wanted an electric one rather than something with a petrol engine, because I know I can buy 100% of my electricity from renewable, non-polluting sources. Beyond that it was just a question of choosing something that would get the job done. And I have to say... well actually no, I won't "say" anything. I'll just let the results speak for themselves.

I have worms

Funny thing: you buy a "Can-O-Worms" but the worms are sold separately. But anyway, as of yesterday I have one of the first and around a thousand of the second, and a hundred and ten fewer dollars in my bank account. That's eleven cents per worm.

The worm farm itself deserves a bit of a plug, I think. For starters it appears to be a really good design. It has legs, a fluid collection base with tap, three "working trays" and a lid. The theory is that when the top tray gets full the bottom tray will contain heaps of fertiliser and very few worms so you just empty the bottom one and then place it at the top. As you add food to the top the worms come up through the holes and begin creating more fertiliser there. Round and round it goes.

It is made of plastic, but it's made of 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. As with my decision to use concrete blocks as part of the base for my water tanks, I think it's an appropriate use of materials. It's hard to imagine something like this being made from anything other than plastic or metal - of which plastic seems like the less wasteful choice. We do have an enormous amount of existing plastic which would otherwise be headed for a landfill. And unlike many other plastic products this one's designed to perform a valuable function over a long period of time.

Moreover, it's made in Australia and there's very little packaging to be "disposed of" after the purchase. You can check out the model I bought here.

Worms are sold separately, as I mentioned. I grabbed a box of a thousand from the shelf right next to the Can-O-Worms. Good thing, too - it turns out that a thousand worms is the minimum recommended number for starting a worm farm. The worms aren't loose in the box, they're buried in a lump of moist, compost-y black stuff which you just place as-is into the worm farm. Once they've eaten through all the tasty parts of that they will, I understand, squirm up through the holes into the next tray in search of the food scraps I've laid out for them.

For the time being they seem content to stay in the bottom tray in their black stuff. Just to prove I'm not making all this up, here's a pic I snapped late this afternoon.

I declare the Weekend of the Worm

Some things were just meant to be. After my mice-infested compost disaster last weekend I've been exchanging comments with Crazy Mumma (her blog here) about the idea of using worms to process kitchen scraps instead of putting them outside where they become food for vermin instead of plants.

CM gave me a link to some instructions on building your own worm farm on the cheap, and now Colin (aka No Impact Man) has just posted his own DIY worm farm tips as well! There's absolutely no excuse left now.

This weekend I'm getting worms. I dare you to join me! (That means you, CM!)

Vaguely like eBay, but free!

I love it when I have an idea and then discover it's already a reality. Not only does it mean the idea was probably a decent one, but it means I can enjoy it without having to put in the effort of making it happen.

Case in point: Freecycle.

"The Freecycle Network™ is made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns... When you want to find a new home for something -- whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano, or an old door -- you simply send an e-mail offering it to members of the local Freecycle group. Or, maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself. Simply respond to a member's offer, and you just might get it."

This kind of voluntary community-based recycling via the internet is something I've been idly thinking about over the past couple of weeks. There's a group with 300+ members based in Strathpine (the suburb immediately to the west of where I live) so I've just sent an email off to join up. Hopefully I'll be able to reduce some of the clutter around my place by simply finding better homes for things, and avoid creating "waste" in the process.

The best way to decay

I have a large backyard by local standards. Our property is 900sqm and the house etc would probably only cover around a third of that area. So there are plenty of trees and shrubs competing with a fair swathe of grass for the remaining space, all of which yield a fair amount of what some people call "garden waste".

Inside, we eat fresh fruit and vegetables on a daily basis and are producing a steady stream of "kitchen waste".

But of course it's not waste. It's a resource which I want to convert into natural fertiliser for enriching the soil and growing healthy food.

My neighbour generously provided me with one of those simple black plastic open-bottomed compost bins which he said was "surplus to requirements". For the last couple of months I've been feeding it with material from both the garden and the kitchen, turning it all over occasionally and adding a bit of water now and then. There's certainly something biological going on in there... the volume of material keeps shrinking and at times there have been different kinds of larvae and/or worms visible. But I'm not convinced that what's being produced is anywhere near as useful for fertilising my veges as I was hoping for.

The same neighbour also loaned me a book on composting which suggested that making compost effectively requires a lot of material to be combined in exactly the right proportions all in one go and then carefully tended. It was like baking a soufflé or something. And the fellow who gave the talk on BioChar a few weeks back implied a similar thing when he mentioned that "hot composts" are too hard to do right in a regular-sized back yard.

So what should somebody like me do? What about people with smaller yards, or mere balconies and courtyards? Well here are a few options:

BioChar bloke showed us pictures of a method of "cold composting" he was experimenting with, which involved digging a series of shallow pits which you would fill up one by one with whatever material came to hand before moving on to the next one. The theory is that by the time you filled up the last one the first would have decomposed to a degree which made its contents useful elsewhere in your garden and the cycle could continue from there. It still takes up a fair bit of space but doesn't require any financial investment to get started.

Part of the reason that "hot composts" require so much material and effort is that they need the bulk to produce and retain the heat, and they need frequent turning over to ensure proper aeration. There's a fancy compost bin on the market aimed at the suburban non-gardeners like me which uses a combination of insulation to trap heat and an innovative central air tube to try and get the benefits of hot composting without the effort. And it gets a very positive review (link to PDF) from a reputable Australian gardening club.

If you don't have a garden or a large family to produce enough waste to feed a large bin like that, then a worm farm could be the way to go. I was astonished to find that you can buy not only the farms themselves but also boxes of live worms from my local hardware megastore. These commercial kits are relatively cheap (compared to the fancy compost bin anyway) but I've seen instructions in various places for how you could build your own from relatively common bits and pieces.

Worms produce a different kind of fertiliser to compost, and you have to be a little careful with what you feed them (they really don't like onion or citrus, I hear) but if you're growing in pots on a balcony or in a courtyard it's pretty much an ideal solution.

I'm probably going to persist with my current compost bin for a little longer and see if I can't make anything useful of it. If not... I'm tempted by worms because they're cheap, effective, self-renewing and probably something the kids would enjoy. The fancy bin is attractive but I'm not sure if buying another new plastic thing is really the kind of solution I'm looking for.

Recovering oil from plastics... in the microwave

Just a quick post before I get started with work for the day.

New Scientist has an article online about a new technique for extracting hydrocarbons (ie, oil) from waste plastics and rubber and the like. Essentially, it just gets cooked in a special microwave which is tuned to the specific frequencies of the hydrocarbon molecules. They heat up, evaporate, and get sucked into a condenser which collects them back into liquid oil.

They don't give any information about how much energy is used in the process compared to how much energy we can extract from the oil (I'm guessing it runs at a loss) but in the long term this approach might have two benefits that I can see.

The first is related to energy. Oil is still an incredibly convenient fuel for transport and we have plenty of plastic and rubber waste which we may be able to "mine" at some stage in the future when naturally-occurring oil becomes too hard (expensive) to get at.

But much more interesting is the ability to cleanly strip plastic and rubber compounds away from other substances: such as removing the insulation from electrical wire and leaving the copper metal exposed. This solves a major problem that existing recycling industries are facing.

Aluminium might be the transport fuel of the future

Just quickly, and with as little techno-speak as possible...

We need to find a fuel to replace the oil which is running out.
Growing crops to produce oils or ethanol doesn't scale well enough.
Hydrogen works well in engines or in fuel cells but is a pain to store and transport.
Purely electric cars are great except for the batteries.

Well some smart people at Purdue University have stumbled across a chemical reaction which might allow a transport fuel cycle that goes like this:

• Generate electricity (from wind, solar, nuclear, whatever)
• Capture and concentrate most of this energy by using it to convert aluminium oxide into aluminium metal in an alloy with gallium
• Put pellets of the energy-containing alloy into a car's fuel tank
• Add water, which reacts with the alloy to produce hydrogen gas (with most of the energy in it) and aluminium oxide
• Use a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back to water, with the energy extracted as electricity to power a motor
• Send the spent alloy back to the factory for "recharging"

Notice that there's no oil or biofuels involved anywhere in that entire cycle, and no emissions of any kind from the cars either. Fuel cell technology still has a long way to develop before it could be usable on the scale of our present-day transportation. And we still have to produce large amounts of electrical energy in the first place to charge up the fuel.

But it's at least a possibility, and the more possibilities we have the better.

My real-life hero?

Am experiencing an unfamiliar feeling.

Obviously the term "hero" is nothing new to me. But I don't think I've ever experienced an emotional response to the words or actions of another person such that I would consider them to be my hero. Until perhaps now.

One of the documentaries I mentioned in the previous post was "Waste Equals Food", which featured the ideas and achievements of William McDonough. It was his book, "Cradle to Cradle", which I ordered after watching the film. (Which was at least partly the aim of the film, I'm quite sure.)

And just now I've come across this speech from almost exactly ten years ago.

It's inspirational reading. Mr McDonough might just have become "my" very first hero. Will let you know what I think of the book.

Council responds re fluoro disposal

I mentioned recently that I'd received inconsistent advice from Brisbane City Council regarding the proper disposal of compact fluorescent light bulbs, which contain small amounts of mercury.

Here's the latest word from them on that subject:

Dear Mr Brady,

Thanks for your enquiry - we are aware of the new requirements for the safe disposal of fluorescent light bulbs and we have been investigating a number of options to address recycling of fluorescent tubes and globes. However, because there are are no cost effective fluorescent recycling opportunities in Brisbane, it will take some time to establish one.

Until a recycling service is organised, you should place the globe/tube in your general waste bin. Brisbane's engineered landfill has the capacity to accept the minute quantities of phosfor and mercury and mitigate environmental harm.

We will amend the detail on the website until a recycling service is organised.

About the mercury in CF light bulbs

A lot of you would have heard that compact fluorescent light bulbs contain one nasty ingredient which the old-style incandescent blubs do not: the dreaded mercury. Everyone agrees that it's good to have bulbs which use less electricity but are we just trading one problem for another?

Well first the good news: although incandescent bulbs don't contain mercury their widespread use still contributes to the release of mercury into the environment around us. This is because the majority of the world's electricity is generated by burning coal and the combustion gases produced contain all sorts of unfriendly things including a significant amount of mercury. Because CF bulbs use so much less electricity and they last so much longer it can be argued that they will result in less mercury entering the environment overall.

That will probably be true for as long as we continue to produce electricity the way we do today. But if we can reduce our reliance on mercury-emitting fuels like coal or tighten up processes so that less of those pollutants are released from a power station, the calculations will be less and less in favour of the CF bulb. For now, in Australia, it's probably safe to say that CF bulbs are the better choice in respect to overall mercury emissions.

But the mercury in the bulbs is still a health hazard in your home and a degree of care needs to be taken. Bear in mind that it's exactly the same type of risk that you've been dealing with your entire life when living with regular fluorescent lights - it's only the shape of the bulb which is different.

The simple rule of thumb is that you shouldn't break them. Mercury is most easily absorbed through the lungs. If you do accidentally break one, open up the windows and doors so that the mercury vapour can disperse as widely and quickly as possible (reducing the amount that you and your family will be exposed to). It's probably wise to wear gloves and a mask while cleaning up the broken bits.

Fluorescent bulbs can be recycled safely but only through special processing and they should certainly not be placed in your regular recycling bin.

The Brisbane City Council provides conflicting information regarding the safe disposal of fluorescent bulbs. On the phone they advised me that "household quantities" of fluorescent bulbs may be placed in the regular waste bin (ideally wrapped in newspaper or the original packaging) and that larger quantities are accepted at waste transfer stations. But their website says such bulbs shouldn't be placed in the bin. I'll be seeking a clarification on this, and I would encourage you to contact your councillor (wherever you live) and asking them to ensure that a safe recycling option is made available.

One final comment: Ikea deserves special mention for the fact that you can return your used CF bulbs to them for recycling, but unfortunately they only sell the "Edison screw" type of bulb and not the "bayonet" type which is by far the most common fitting in Australian homes.