Third photo shows some of the 2000 square feet of recycled roofing metal we salvaged from a local roofer that didn't want to have to pay to get rid of it.
Pallets R US! Today's photos and entry are about "waste" and "resources". Putting an emphasis on sustainable living has really made us see that we live in a throw-away society. Part of the reason for this is that recycling wastes and repairing used tools and equipment takes time, and time is money (wages). For most people, it doesn't make economic sense to spend 10 hours trying to fix their car when they are busy working 40 to 80 hours/week, and can just leave the car at the shop and have someone else do it for them. Then, they just need to work a little more to pay the repairman. The problem is, that a lot of repairs end up costing too much to make it worth doing (due to high labor costs) so it becomes cheaper to throw out the car, tool or appliance.
Why are wages, and the cost of living so high? Part of it, I think, is because we live in a society that is artificially accelerated by relatively cheap fossil fuels.
We're finding that part of trying to live sustainably involves looking at wastes as a resource. This is better for the whole, and better for us too. Using what others view as waste involves moving backward a bit on the wage scale. We spend less time working for money, but more time doing things for ourselves. Instead of buying a new car, you buy an old car, and fix it yourself. You may find that you achieve the same result (transportation) for a tenth of what others spend per year to achieve the same result (except maybe your car isn't as shiny and trendy as theirs). But, the time that you spend fixing the thing may look like you are only making $5 to $10/hr, mainly because it takes you longer than a professional mechanic might take to do the work. Then again, from our experience, the pros are under the gun to get things done FAST and cheap, so the end result when you do your own work is often much higher quality. Plus, strangely enough, a lot of the "pros" don't really like what they are doing, and so aren't really willing to look up critical information involved in repairing something. In other words, they often do really lousy work.
We've found that doing things for ourselves gives us a lot of satisfaction. There's no need for company moral boosting sessions and company slogans, just the sound of the birds chirping and the wind in the trees as you work away at home and, OUCH!, skin your knuckles on that exhaust clamp again. There's a good feel to this lifestyle, and a lot of mental challenge at times, trying to find ways to do more with less, and to turn wastes into a resource.
What about wastes? People throw out EVERYTHING. And it just goes into a big whole in the ground and is covered up with dirt, or in some cases, is incinerated for power production, leaving behind interesting pollutants, both airborne and solid. What kind of society would spend all of that energy extracting non-renewable resources from the only planet that they have, use the resource for a short period, and then bury it to decompose, in many cases contaminating their drinking water in the process? Not one we want to encourage. So, we look at these waste products as a resource.
We collected 2000 square feet of heavy gauge roofing metal from a roofing contractor who had carefully taken it off of a roof and placed it on a trailer prior to taking it to the dump where he would have had to pay a fee to get rid of it. He was quite happy to give it to us. We've used it for roofing the summer kitchen, putting a roof over the camper trailer, for fabricating metal skirting around the platform of the yurt, for siding our compost bins, and smaller pieces keep coming in handy for various projects.
The local hardware store has piles of wooden pallets out back, many of them constructed of oak. They periodically truck them off to the landfill, or burn them, so were happy to give us as many as we could take. We find them invaluable around the place, for supporting tanks, stacking materials on, including firewood, up off the ground, as work tables. This year we hope to build an entire woodshed out of rocks (foundation), pallets (walls and roof framing), and recycled roofing metal (roof). I'm sure there will be other pallet buildings in our future.
The county landfill is starting to look at ways to cut down on wastes entering the landfill, as they are running out of space to pile it all. They're looking at buying a crusher/baler to make glass sand, bale metals, paper and plastics for recycling. They're one step behind the next county over, which does all that, plus chips all non-reuseable wood (construction and yard waste) and gives away the wood chips. They shipped some over to our county, and we collected a truck and trailerload to use in mulching our garden beds. We're now thinking of buying a small wood chipper/mulcher to use on our land, to chip the smaller branches.
But what about our wastes? The ultimate in sustainability is to close the loop as close to home as you can. So, what wastes do we produce that can be re-used. Hmm.... Well, there's an obvious one, but someone else has written about it a lot better than I can. Check out
http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html We've been using the methods outlined in that book now for years, and when we return to modern society's method of dealing with this waste product, it feels totally wrong. There's something really strange about doing your business in your drinking water, then flushing it down a long pipe to a complex treatment plant where chemicals are added to it, then sending that into the river, then taking water back out and adding more chemicals and treatment to repeat the whole process again. Then, since our farms don't have enough fertilizer, they use artificially made fertilizer that involves an enormous industrial process and kills the soil microorganisms. OK, I'll stop, but really, read that book.
We also recycle all of our graywater. The sink drains through a strainer into a bucket which we use to fill a watering can to water the garden. The food particles in the strainer get added to the compost pile. The compost pile will become humus that next year will be used to grow the plants that we eat. We harvest our firewood by hand, and use the extra heat for cooking, heating dishwater, etc. The wood ashes go on the garden. It feels great to reconnect ourselves to natural cycles, and to disconnect from artificial, overly complex ones.
The first pic shows the revised rainwater catchment system for the roof of our summer kitchen. The old system, incorporating a 4" black corrugated polyethylene flexible pipe, slit along one edge and held onto the roof with plumbers' strapping, got forced off the edge by ice over the winter. We started to buy $70 worth of metal gutter, gutter fittings and downspouts, then realized that it would probably get ripped off the roof too, and what would we do with all that slit flexible pipe leftover? So, we cut it in half, and reattached it to the roof framing, leaving part uncut to serve as a downspout to a larger collection tank. The hope is that the flexible pipe will bend under the snow and ice and pop back up in the spring to catch the snowmelt. We'll see!
We had other rainwater catchment to do, but getting a garden in became top priority, so we started clearing more of the Gambel Oak from the shallow slope just below the yurt. Here's a picture of the area before we started.
The third pic shows Jeanne laying newspaper in the cleared garden. We use a no-till method of gardening called "sheet mulching" by some. It worked well back in Maine on mown pasture with good soil, but it's hard to tell how well it's going to work in cleared oak brush on clay soil. It involves clearing or mowing the area (normally this would have been done in the fall), spreading any soil amendments (we used manure donated by the neighbor's llamas), then laying down 2 to 4 sheets of wetted newspaper (don't use the pages with the glossy color print, only the black and white, which is printed with soy-based inks - check with your newspaper printer). This serves as a weed barrier for the first year. Then cover the newspaper with mulch (rotted leaves, seedless straw, rotted pine needles all seem to work fine). When you are ready to plant, get some good soil (we found that the soil from the canyon bottom at the lower end of our land was wonderful and mined some of it for our yurt garden). Poke a hole down through the mulch and newspaper with a garden trowel, put in a couple handfuls of good soil, and plant your seeds right in that plug of good soil. As the plants grow, the mulch can be pulled in around the plant to help keep the moisture in the soil, critical in our dry western climate. When we used this method in Maine, we were able to plant something like 1000 onion bulbs in a day, (we grew them commercially for one season), spent only about 3 person-hours weeding during the summer, and harvested them in another day, and sold them for a net gain of $315. Not incredible wages, but considering that the second year would have been even easier (less prep work required), not bad either, considering we didn't have to commute or dress up to go to work, just wander down to the garden area and start doing.
The fourth photo has nothing to do with sustainability. We attended the Pagosa Spring Memorial Day weekend bluegrass fest for a couple of days. In the spirit of living sustainably, we try to live as frugally as possible, so we volunteered at the festival for five hours in the ticket cabin in exchange for three day passes to the event. This picture shows our view of The Infamous Stringdusters, our favorite group, kicking it up on stage. I'd post a video, but I'm afraid it would take up all of my blogspot memory allowance. They were (are) great!
