Net Zero Waste

Creating the Compost Habit

~ Jean Wiedenheft ~ 1 Comment

I love the idea of compost. When I first started, years ago, it instantly reduced my trash output by 50 percent. Just like that, you can make great strides towards a zero-waste lifestyle. It also instantly creates healthy, rich soil in which to garden. I have two copies of the pamphlet, “…Make Compost in 14 Days,” on my bookshelf. Because that is knowledge too important to lose.

But…compost is smelly. It creates flies, gnats, and a host of flying insects I cannot begin to name. You have to trudge to the garden through the rain, and the snow, and the mud, and the mosquitoes. It takes time. Not a lot of time, but time all the same. You have to do it daily, or the flying insects and the smells begin to lose that indoor/outdoor boundary.

My garden, wedged in a narrow patch of sunlight among oak trees, was designed for growing veggies, not an ever-expanding pile of rotting veggies, so there were some boundary issues. There is nothing healthy about trying to find a fresh strawberry under an avocado husk. I quickly matured into a fair-weather composter when I felt inspired.

When the pandemic started two years ago, I lost access to basic services including trash, recycling and compost pickup, and suddenly composting became very high on my priority list. Why? There are only so many times you can beg your friends to let you put things in their trash, and only so much trash you feel like dragging around town to the houses of friends. Friends you aren’t supposed to be visiting because its a pandemic. “Um, hi. I didn’t come to visit you, just your trash can.” The friends I have are really, really good people.

A friend set me up with a two bin tumbler system, and that was awesome. It kept the scraps contained and kept the yard tidy. I used one bin primarily for high acidity things, including coffee grounds and lemons. This was for the blueberry bushes. I used the other bin for most everything else. While it still had to be done every day, the alternative idea of living amid ever increasing piles of waste is not a healthy way to even contemplate living.

Most bins and tumblers on the market don’t create enough heat to break down some things, like weed seeds. For compost to generate enough heat to start breaking things like that down with heat, it needs to be a 3’x3’x3′ pile. Since we all know piles are unstable as cubes, that’s actually a big pile. Huge. Compost shrinks as it composts, which means that’s a lot of compost. More than I can generate.

My solution: don’t put weeds that have seeded out in the compost bin. Throw them in the yard, where they will at least be mowed down after germination. A better solution would be to weed before the weeds set seed, but I am not always that sort of gardener. Mostly, I am the sort of gardener that solves the problem of not knowing what to do with pulled weeds by simply not weeding at all.

Eventually, my trash, recycling, and compost service resumed. Interestingly enough, I have kept composting, at least March-December. Keeping non-essential paths clear during the ice and snow of January and February are beyond my physical capacity.

Composting plastic magic

~ Jean Wiedenheft ~ Leave a comment

My first smart phone lived in a protector-series Otterbox. I could drop it in the river, drop it on the fire line, or run over it with the car, and it was fine. When I got my new phone, I was in the midst of my zero-waste obsession, and I ordered a Pela from Canada.

The Otter Box I got in the store when I got my phone. The Pela? I had to order. It took so long to come, I joked that they had to grow the flax to make the case (I suspect, as they have gotten bigger, they have been able to ramp up their production significantly).

The Pela is not an Otterbox. It has protected my phone from an occasional spill on concrete, but…recognizing that the Pela may not offer the protection I am used to, I have become more conscientious about maintaining my phone in a safe environment.

Here’s why I don’t regret my decision.

Pela offers a lot of great information about recycling and composting on their website. Their phone (or any other tech product you may want to protect) case is 100 percent compostable.

Pela cases are beautiful. Mine is grey with a penguin, but you can get clear, honeybees, sea turtles, or just about anything else you want that expresses your personality, beyond the obvious facts that you are classy and care about the world around you.

Pela cases are slim enough that my phone fits in my pocket or my handbag. The Otterbox couldn’t.

Pela is creating the the future I want to live in. By supporting them, I am helping create that world.

Small Steps to Zero Waste

~ Jean Wiedenheft ~ Leave a comment

Packaging after-dinner leftovers can be something of a challenge in our house.

Jerry: I’ll clean up.

Jean: Awesome.

Moments pass. Then a wad of plastic wrap goes sailing into the living room.

Jerry: Maybe if you could just do something with the leftovers…

Jean: Of course.

Moments pass. A second wad of plastic wrap (this one launched by me) goes sailing into the living room.

Jerry: Maybe it will fit into a little container?

Plastic wrap has long been the bane of our kitchen. The metal teeth on the box will cut part of it, but not all of it. If the wrap is within 2″ of the box, it sticks to itself as if it were in a strange gravitational field. But getting the plastic wrap to stick nicely on anything once it’s out of the box is a disaster.

Jean: What did people used to do?

Jerry: They starved a lot. So when there was food, they ate it all.

This is clearly not a problem today (as my belly will attest to). But in a slightly less-distant past, back in the “good old days” when plastic wrap actually worked the way it was intended, it was made from polyvinylidene chloride. In 2004 it became in vogue to use low-density polyethylene (since vinyl and chloride are both chemicals that create a lot of problems, this was probably a really smart move). The new version may have made manufacturing cheaper and eliminated concerns about chloride, but it also doesn’t work. Except as interesting, non-harmful indoor projectiles when wadded up. All filmy plastics, including our wads of plastic wrap and sandwich bags, can be recycled with the plastic bag recycling. Which is good, but it is ridiculous for me to buy something just for the sake of recycling it.

Since I’ve been fortunate enough to never be close to starvation, I needed a better solution, and found it in beeswrap. Its natural, reusable, and wait for it…really works. I’ve been using it for three months now and only wish I had given up on plastic wrap years ago.