Tasty Rainwater

Last year I blogged about getting a rainwater tank and said I’d be drinking rainwater soon. I got it at the end of winter, but it filled with rain from the unusual downpours in November. I didn’t start drinking it then because my dad suggested I don’t drink the initial water, to ensure any contaminants from manufacture were washed away. Over summer I used the water on the garden and the tank filled again this winter. Now, nine months later, I’m drinking rainwater from my tank.

The first time I drank water from the tank it tasted so different to mains water from the kitchen tap. I thought it tasted purer, but that might be the only way I can think of to describe the difference. I have an old house, with ancient plumbing and I’m sure this does something to the water. In summer I don’t like drinking it straight from the tap, I refrigerate it first. In winter the cold air refrigerates it, so I don’t taste whatever it is I don’t like* (and it is the plumbing that affects the taste, not chlorine or fluoride or whatever, I’m happy to drink water straight from the tap at other houses). After drinking rainwater for a few weeks I’ve got used to whatever the difference is and it just tastes like water now, but I still love drinking it. Water is my favourite drink.

Drinking Rain (next year)

I’ve been planning to get a rainwater tank (also known as a rainwater barrel or butt depending on where you live) since the start of the year, in time for last winter’s rain, but things got in the way. I first thought I would use the collected water for my garden in summer, but then I realised it would last about a week in Perth’s dry summers. Then I decided I would drink the rain water. My friends at Nuts about Natives do this and it works well. They have a ceramic and charcoal filter, and scrub the roof and guttering before the first winter rains.

Now, after much um-ing and ah-ing I have a rainwater tank. It was delivered during the very wet week in September. It’s a 1500L above ground tank in heritage green, to match the posts of my carport. To get my drinking water, I will fill a ceramic and carbon filter from the tank tap and it will sit in the kitchen, to provide all my drinking needs. Now the hot weather has arrived I’m drinking a lot more water. I’ve decided not to plumb the tank into my house, mainly because it would run out very quickly. The WA Department of Water provides rebates for part of the cost of rainwater tanks. It’s only $50 if the tank is not plumbed into the house, but it’s still worth it.

Incey wincey spider

Last year I blogged about my liking for spiders, as long as they stay outside in the garden. Crazy Mumma recently blogged about how she hates finding Huntsman spiders in her house and I don’t like this so much either, but I thought I was a lot calmer about it now than I was as a kid. This was because I usually only ever find Daddy long-legs (Pholcus phalangioides) or black house spiders (Badumna insignis) inside. They’re not big or scary.

Killing Roaches

I hate cockroaches. They were always around our house when I was little. You had to wack the roach with a shoe if you wanted to get rid of it. I wonder now if the reason was because my mum didn’t use toxic cockroach baits. The active ingredient is chlorpyrifos (an anticholinesterase compound). The packet says it should be kept away from sewers, drains and ponds. The Extension Toxicology Network says this is because it’s

very highly toxic to freshwater fish, aquatic invertebrates and estuarine and marine organisms.

When Ayesha the cat was younger she hunted and ate cockroaches, which was very kind of her. Since she grew up and progressed to larger prey, she refuses to stoop to roach killing.

I’ve used the toxic stuff since I moved out of my parents’ house, but I’ve been wanting to mend my ways. Jenn at Tiny Choices recommends

bottlecaps filled with a mixture of cornmeal and boric acid, and sometimes this works incredibly well.

The Concrete Jungle

Sometimes I quite like the concrete jungle because I skateboard and I wouldn’t be able to without smooth concrete surfaces, although I’ve seen a skate video where someone is skating boulders in the US desert and it looks like fun. Other times I hate all the concrete and asphalt of our cities.

Scottish crofter Stonehead mentioned that

the airline industry is a major producer of carbon emissions and we’re urged to either not fly or only fly if genuinely necessary.

But he notes there’s an industry that’s trying to keep as low a profile as the airline industry, but may be a bigger producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

Production of just one tonne of cement results in the emission of 900kg of carbon dioxide, which means global carbon emissions by the cement industry total 1.44 billion tonnes.

Stonehead suggests decreasing our demand for cement.

Ask yourself if you really need a bigger, new-build conventional house with a concrete foundation and concrete block walls. Ask yourself if you really need that extension, that patio or that conservatory. Ask if your shed really does need a foundation made of poured concrete or concrete slabs.

Drinking Rain

Of course we all drink rain, one way or another. The water cycle eventually recycles all water into the sky and then back down to the earth, but some people drink their water a bit closer to when it fell as rain, than others. Sadly I’m not one of these people, but I look forward to the time when I have a rainwater tank.

I just came across Greenfoot’s blog and her question about Sustainable House Day. Georgie commented on the Australia Street house in Newtown, Sydney.

The house incorporates all manner of sustainable features, including a ventilation stack and a low-tox or no-tox approach to paints and glues throughout. It also features a pool: a decadent, gorgeous plunge pool, tucked in a corner of the courtyard next to the living area, filled entirely by water from the house’s rainwater tank. [1]

GreenPower

Many electricity companies sell power from renewable sources, but depending on where you live, different options are available. Western Australia doesn’t have as many electricity companies as the eastern states of Australia because the industry was only recently deregulated and until a few years ago electricity was provided by a state government owned company.

Perth has only one company which provides electricity. Until I install my own solar panels to generate electricity, I have to use their electricity. I purchase it through their NaturalPower product, which provides energy generated from renewable sources. Synergy Energy says,

When you switch to NaturalPower you will still receive a mix of energy types [coal-fuelled, solar, wind, hydro,etc], as it is not practical to install additional power lines just to carry NaturalPower. However, we guarantee the amount of energy you use will be sourced from renewable sources and will increase the overall amount of renewable energy in the grid.

NaturalPower costs 3c per unit more than ordinary electricity. I’m a student and so I don’t have a lot of money, but the increase in my electricity bill after switching to NaturalPower hasn’t been onerous.

NaturalPower is accredited by the National GreenPower Accreditation Program and Green Electricity Watch rates it as “good,” the highest rating for WA energy providers.

But NaturalPower isn’t all good. I don’t like the fact that if more people sign up for it, this doesn’t necessarily mean the electricity provider will buy more energy from renewable sources. I guess if enough people sign up, they will have to because they

guarantee the amount of energy you use will be sourced from renewable sources.

A quicker way to increase the amount of renewable energy would be to increase Australia’s Mandatory Renewable Energy Target, which is set at 9,500GWh by 2010. This current target will only increase Australia’s renewable energy market by about 1-2 percent. The Australian Conservation Foundation suggests a better target would be 25 percent.

Synergy Energy has another product called Earth Friendly where they offset the emissions created in the production of the coal generated electricity by contributing to greenhouse gas reduction programs. These include: sequestration (planting trees), methane flaring, landfill diversion, and fuel substitution (converting coal or oil to gas). Green Electricity Watch recommends this be avoided.

=^.^=

Garbage in, Garbage out

Doing the right thing here means more than recycling; it means rethinking, and so reshaping, the place we want to be.
– John Vella, 2006, “Trailertrashed” Island no.107

My local council has only one bin into which we put everything and it’s sorted into recyclables and landfill, at the Atlas Materials Recovery Facility. The City of Stirling says its recycling and rubbish service is

simple and convenient to use for all the City’s residents.

The system is called Single Bin Recycling: A Truly Sustainable Process which has

increased the amount of domestic waste being recycled from 10 percent to more than 60 percent. This success is unmatched by any other local authority in Western Australia.

When their PR machine gets going, it does sound amazing, and maybe I’m a little more convinced than I have been in the past, but if it’s so amazing, why doesn’t everyone do it? I’ve recently found out through Treehugger and the Closet Environmentalist that other places do use a single bin system. An article in The Economist talks about TiTech’s rubbish sorting system which uses spectroscopy. At the City of Stirling, it’s not so high-tech and people pick out glass (broken glass goes to landfill), plastic bottles (PET & HDPE) and aluminium cans, and an electro-magnet recovers steel cans.

Organic waste, including paper, is turned into “high quality compost” which is then used in agriculture (after being transported 200km to a farm near Calingiri, WA). The City of Stirling came up with this idea because the Western Australian government has adopted a vision of zero waste to landfill by the year 2020.

All my kitchen scraps (and anything else that’s biodegradable eg. dog hair, garden waste) goes into my compost bin. This means my rubbish bin doesn’t smell so much because it doesn’t have rotting food in it. It also means the only organic material I’m contributing to the sorting process is paper and cardboard. Paper can be recycled back to paper, rather than going into compost (I wonder how the ink affects their compost). So I don’t like this aspect of the system.

The City of Stirling’s statistics for improvement of recycling are shown in this diagram, where 9.4% of rubbish is recyclable packaging (glass, aluminium cans, steel cans, type 1 & 2 plastic). This could be equated with the original amount of 10% of waste recycled. So basically their “compost manufacture” is where all the new recycling is coming from. Most people don’t make their own compost, so I guess the system caters to them.

The single bin system is only for sorting rubbish and The Economist article goes on to discuss the difficulties of recycling plastic, because there are so many different types. At the City of Stirling only type 1 & 2 plastic is recycled, the other types and plastic bags and wrappings go to landfill.

A solution to the problems of recycling is discussed by Paul Palmer in The Death of Recycling from Rachel’s Democracy & Health News #900. Redesigning products for reuse is a more sustainable practice than continuing to use old technology to recycle paper, plastic, glass, metal, etc. Redesigning for reuse produces zero waste.

William McDonough and Michael Braungart have previously written about this in Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press, 2002)

If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle (as opposed to cradle-to-grave) system of nutrient flow…To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things – products, packaging, and systems – from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. (p.104)

Here’s some other things to read about trash, rubbish and recycling.
Everyday Trash takes a closer look at what we throw away.

Scientists at Purdue University have developed a biorefinery, a generator that’s fuelled by rubbish. They developed it for use by the U.S. military, but one of the inventors,

Ladisch foresees a time when the biorefinery could be used at a variety of factories, restaurants or stores. The biorefinery could probably be used to generate a little extra electricity at any place that generates a fair amount of food and scrap waste.

I’ve recently come across On Garbage by John Scanlan (Reaktion, 2005). I’ve added it to my way-too-long reading list. I’ll get to it one day. Find it at your local library.

=^.^=

Electricity from the Sun

I have a long term plan to build my own sustainably designed house. When I build this house I want to install solar panels to generate my own electricity. The house would still be connected to grid electricity. At times when the sun was shining I might produce more electricity than I use and sell surplus back to the power grid. At times when the sun wasn’t shining I would have to buy electricity from the grid. The sun shines a lot in Perth, so solar power is an ideal form of electricity generation. Perth is also a very windy city, so wind power would work well too.

It is expensive to purchase and install photovoltaic cells, but cheaper than it has been in the past and the price is decreasing. Many governments, including Australia’s, give rebates for installation of photovoltaic cells. Matthew Warren in The Australian newspaper[1] said that, despite this rebate,

It is still some of the most expensive electricity in the market with the full cost of the cells often not recovered over their entire 30-year-plus lifetime. Critics of this [rebate] scheme argue it is great for retailers and some manufacturers, but it is still largely symbolic stimulating imports of PV cells more than a dynamic solar industry in Australia.

Robert Silvey disagrees with Matthew Warren’s assessment of the cost and discusses the installation of photovoltaic cells in his house in California (which provides rebates) and why it will increase his home equity.

Australian has been a world leader in solar technology since the 1970s and the University of NSW and Australian National University are internationally recognised in solar technology development. Unfortunately most of their ideas are commercialised overseas[1]. This happens a lot in Australia

because of a lack of government support at critical stages of the research and development cycle coupled with weak venture capital markets in Australia compared with many countries overseas.

Another Australian government scheme, the Renewable Remote Power Generation Program (RRPGP) provides a 50% rebate to offset the capital costs of establishing a renewable energy system for remote communities or households. Remote areas are not connected to the electricity grid and thier electricity was previously provided through diesel generators. Now diesel generators can just be used as backup to variable renewable sources[2]. Denis Smedley, director of the Renewable Energy Deployment Team in the Australian Greenhouse Office which administers the program, said,

The most common form of renewable energy used in remote communities is solar power.

Rottnest Island off the coast of Perth received a grant from RRPGP for a 600 kW wind turbine to supply up to 40% of the island’s energy. This will save about 430 000 litres of diesel a year and approximately 1100 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Some pictures of houses with multiple solar panels are here. And Ma Yanjun, of Qiqiao village, Shaanxi province, China rigged up his own solar water heater using beer bottles.

=^.^=

Offline Sources

1. Warren, Matthew (2007) “Politics of carbon” The Australian, 9 June, p.1 of Clean Energy section.
2. Parker, Derek (2007) “Wind, sun switch on the isolated” The Australian, 9 June, p.6 of Clean Energy section.

Plastic: so durable, so full of potential

Plastic that ends up in the ocean can cause enormous problems for sea life. Whenever I think about this topic I picture a turtle that’s ingested a plastic bag (it looked like a tasty jelly fish) starving to death because his stomach is full with the plastic bag. Even after plastic starts to break down (it does happen eventually) animals further down the food chain are affected by the smaller pieces.

Andy Warhol once said he was in love with plastic. So durable, so full of potential, everything just sliding off the surface. I could definitely see the appeal.
from Notes from the Teenage Underground by Simmone Howell (Pan Macmillan, 2006)

A commenter to The Coffee House’s post agrees with Andy Warhol’s liking for plastic,

Plastics are extremely important packaging materials; specifically, they protect our foods from contamination and decay, they are cheap to produce.

I too make the most of the appeal of plastic (as much as I wish I didn’t) and to continue this, but not drown in an ocean of plastic, we need to re-use and recycle plastic. When I go shopping I use calico bags which I acquired when I worked in a public library. I prefer to use plastic bags for meat and frozen things because they sometimes leak and fruit and vegies because they have a tendency to roll away. I reuse these plastic bags, so I have to remember to take them with my calico bags when I shop. I can only re-use these plastic bags a few times before they start to get holes, but then I use them for bin liners (putting a piece of paper against any holes is enough to stop it while I fill the bag). I don’t want to pay money for bin liners (and their extra packaging) when shops in Perth are happy to hand out plastic bags for free.

I buy too many things in plastic containers and just like glass bottles and jars, I try to re-use them, but there is a limit to how much storage junk you can collect and when that limit is reached, recycling comes into play. For quite some time I’ve thought that my local council’s Single Bin Recycling system did not recycle plastic, and although I put all my plastic waste in the single bin, I thought it went to landfill. After recently looking at my local council’s website, they do say they recycle some plastics, so perhaps I’ve been wrong (or they’ve changed what they recycle). And before I put the plastic rings from bottles and jars in the bin I cut them up because a whole ring is just the right size to strangle an animal. If they’re recycled this shouldn’t be a problem, but I still do it.

Twice a year the council does a bulk rubbish collection where you put out large items eg. furniture, appliances, toys, general junk, etc and they are removed (out of sight, out of mind). This is also the time for the neighbourhood to patrol the streets, looking for free treasure. When I lived in a share house with Josephine, she was the queen of finding the treasure from bulk rubbish collection. Our sofa had two sides at right angles and was found on the side of the road. It was just covered in dog hair and had some stains. All it needed was a thorough vacuum and to be covered in blankets. It was a very comfy sofa.

The flyer for the most recent bulk rubbish collection said pile plastic items separately for recycling. I thought, “Wow the council recycles plastic now.” I filled up a big plastic bag with all the plastic bottles we’d used that week, even though you weren’t supposed to put out household waste. I considered saving up all my plastic bottles for six months till the next bulk rubbish collection, but after realising they do recycle plastic weekly, I won’t have to.

=^.^=