Building some new compost and leaf mould bins part 1

It's time to make more compost! So I took delivery of some more modular compost bins from The Recycle Works

This is my composting area, the yellow builders bags are full of finished compost and leaf mould, dug out from the compost bins

 

There were six wooden compost bins in this empty space before, but some of the wooden planks had rotted away ( well, they had been buried in decomposing material for more than eight years!) and the ground had become uneven due to tree roots and needed levelling.

So we dismantled the old bins and dug out the base. Quite a lot of the older posts and planks can be reused but the inner posts and planks will be replaced by new ones, as they are the ones which get the most contact with decompostition :) The bricks are there to put the compost bin posts on.

Because we have a bindweed problem everywhere we always put down geotextile under the bins - it does NOT affect the compost process at all

First couple of new The Recycle Works wooden compost bins in place, they simply add on to the old ones :)

Thank you to Mrs Green

The lovely Mrs Green does a Sunday roundup on her blog, where, she says

It’s that time of the week again when I get to share some great eco friendly stories from around the world.

They will be linked to reducing, reusing, recycling or composting our way to a zero waste future.

So without further ado, let’s see who has been helping make the world a better place this week.

and she has very kindly picked me this week! She has featured my Zero Waste Day efforts.

So thank you Mrs Green and if you DO want to come over and video me doing the forfeit, just shout ;-)

My (almost) zero waste day..cont...

Thank you to all of you for posting such encouraging, enthusiastic posts!

I am SO glad that you feel inspired to have a go at this as well!
And I would say GO FOR IT!!

And to those of you who though 20 g wasn't enough of a waste to do the forfeit...

well I DID produce some waste so I AM going to do it!

I shall sit in one of my compostbins, as promised...and I shall put up photographic evidence that I have done so..

But perhaps I shall sit in a relatively clean bin, as it WAS "only" 20 g of waste...?

;-)

My Zero Waste Day

As I have already blogged about here, I promised to go waste free for a day and if I failed I said I would sit in a Compost bin...

We already reduce our purchase of "stuff" by growing our own food and making meals from scratch, etc... reuse containers and tubs for other purposes rather than throwing them "away" ( not that there is any such place!) compost everything which can be composted, buy stuff in the recyclable option if at all possible, and generally produce very little waste.

Typically we "throw away" into the Landfill bin about 200g of waste a week, usually plastics we do not have the ability to recycle here.

So when I went on to the Recycle Week 2009 website, I found it hard to find a challenge that would, well, challenge me! Recycling, composting, food waste reduction, re use etc etc , we do all those already!

Then I saw the "go waste free for a day" option... hmmm well I thought, "why not?"

So...I signed up and my forfeit, if I failed, was to sit in a compostbin. And Compostman was emailed by the Recycle Now team, to check I actually did it!

I decided Sunday would be a good day to do my challenge, for no special reason other than I had been too busy the rest of the week to make notes or take photos! I also decided I was NOT going to make a special effort, I was just going to do my usual stuff and see what waste I generated.

So breakfast on Sunday, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, and toast and butter and tea. Fruit from garden, stored in old containers of soft fruit bought from shops in the past - ideal for re use as that is what they were designed to hold!

Bananas, as usual, bought in compostable packaging or "naked".



Bread, home made, stored in the freezer in re used ( many many times) bread bags. Ingredients bought in bulk and the packaging ( paper and foil) recycled



Butter from foil or a tub, which is always washed and recycled or re used as a storage/freezer container many times...

At 11 am, so far, so good!

I fed the cats with cat biscuit from a cardboard box ( recycled when empty) and cat meat from cans or foil trays.



You may remember I agonised and ranted a bit over this in a previous post? Well we made a decision to only buy cans or foil trays as a result of our calculations and have stuck to our choice ever since. Likewise the cat biscuit is ALWAYS in card or paper containers so it can be recycled or composted after emptying.





I made some tea, composting the tea bags as always and rinsing and recycling the milk container.

Sometimes I reuse the containers as watering spouts for plants in the garden too!

I did some vacuuming, emptying the bag into the compost bin, and went to clean out the chickens ( all three houses!) and yes, everything went into the compost bins! All this is normal practice for us, I didn't do anything special!

Lunch was tomatoes, cucumber and cheese muffins for Compostgirl and shop bought quiche and a piece of left over home made pizza from Sat night for Compostman and I plus some home grown salad and some shop bought tomatoes. The quiche was in a foil container and a cardboard box, both of which were recycled. The tomatoes were in a card container, which went in the compost bin.

We had coffee ( filter paper and grounds composted) and Compostgirl had some juice ( from a tetra pak, which will go in the tetra pak recycling bin in Ledbury, which I helped to get put in place!)

Our Kitchen compost caddy.

I nipped out to do some shopping, take some recycling to the HWS and get some petrol, taking my shopping bags with me, so no waste there!



More tea was drunk during the afternoon ( tea bags composted) and other drinks of water were consumed as was some more fruit by Compostgirl. The scraps of strawberry she left over were composted.



Our evening meal was roast chicken, new potatoes, broad beans, sweetcorn and broccoli. We also had some wine. The veg was no problem, all but the sweetcorn had been grown by us or a neighbour so no packaging, the sweetcorn can was washed and recycled and the peelings were composted, the wine bottle was washed and added to the winemaking supplies

BUT the chicken came in a thin plastic bag!

Oh no, I had some non recyclable waste to dispose of! It weighed 15 g!

We then ate some grapes, the punnet was added to my supplies of containers I use to grow salads in, but the outer plastic film, again, was of a sort not recyclable in my area! Oh no, another 5 g !

So, at the end of Sunday we had 2 bits of plastic film to put in the Landfill bin.
:-(
weighing a grand total of 20 g.

In a week we usually put out about 150 g of waste, usually plastic stuff I can't avoid or re use in some way.

Does my only 20 g of domestic waste mean I " get let off" my forfeit? :-0 Personally, I don't think it should, , as "Every little hurts" to paraphrase a well know supermarket.....and we DID send stuff to Landfill, so it wasn't a zero waste day.

I COULD have made my life easier by choosing a different meal for dinner...but I didn't think of that! AND if I had, it would have seemed to be cheating , somehow! I wanted to do a zero waste day as far as possible on a normal sort of day!

I think I will have to try harder ;-)

Have any of you tried a zero waste day? How did you get on? Was it hard? or was it easy?