A glass half-full and getting fuller

October 21-27 is an important week!

Last week, I finished a Master Composter/Recycler "refresher course." It was well worth the time and effort to attend ten classes, two of them full days at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre and Compost's Cool.

When I became an MCR in 2007, things were quite different. Edmonton's Waste Management was considered world class, with an amazing system that saw Edmontonians using blue bags for recycling, Eco Stations for Household Hazardous Wastes and bulky items, and our garbage cans for almost everything else. The City had a pretty incredible Composting Facility that was able to separate the organic and inorganic materials in our garbage without us worrying about it.

But in 2017, the City discovered that the Composting Facility had structural issues related to the high temperatures and moisture that are byproducts of composting. The roof of the structure was found to be unsafe a few years earlier than expected, and the facility had to be closed for the safety of its workers. Since then, most of our garbage has gone directly to our landfill, which is 80 km away near Riley, AB. That's a long way to truck garbage, and it's giving us a good opportunity to take a hard look at our waste.

Is the glass half empty, or half full? Depends on how you look at it. I like to think that the prohibitive cost of replacing the metal roof of a building the size of almost two and a half CFL football fields is giving Edmontonians a chance to consider the true costs of our garbage and how we can create less waste from the get go. We've done well in the past, but we can do so much better in the future!

On our MCR class tour of the Edmonton Waste Management Centre, we came across the graphic to the right. It tells us that most of Edmonton's waste comes from our need to have tidy yards. The fact is that sending grass clippings and yard waste to the dump is a huge contributor to our city's overall waste budget. If we could "leave it on our lawn" as the "Go Bagless" waste reduction promotions suggest, we save our environment a lot of wear and tear in terms of fossil fuel emissions required to haul all that good, compostable green stuff out to the EWMC, where it's put on long-haul trucks and sent to Riley for the time being. We'd also save on our own personal wear and tear if we stopped dragging our grasses to the garbage! See my old moodling about the other benefits of going bagless!

Misplaced recyclables and Eco Station items account for another almost 20% of our waste. If you're not sure what to do with an item, try the Waste Wise app (click here to find it.) It has plenty of helpful information, and a fun little game for the kids in us all.

All that's left is the almost 45% of garbage and food scraps. Within the next year, the City will be asking residents to adopt a new way of separating their garbage, effectively cutting it in half. We'll still have blue bags for recyclable items, but a black bin will take the 22% that is un-recyclable and non-reusable items, and a green bin will take the other 22% that are compostables, and both will be picked up by mechanical means so that our waste collectors won't get so worn out (the average collector lifts between 14 and 22 metric tonnes of waste per day, imagine!)

Besides protecting our collectors by separating our garbage at the source, we are all challenged to waste less and compost more. And that's important because it means that maybe we aren't buying excess stuff that only goes to waste, and we are returning to the earth the food scrap nutrients from natural resources that we can't eat, so that more good things can be grown.

I have a neighbour who loves to complain. His complaint is that he's going to have to separate his own waste and work harder for the same waste disposal service provided by the city. What he's missing is that we were spoiled by the City for a long time. His parents and grandparents had to do a lot more to take care of their own waste than we do now. By separating his own waste, he'll only be doing his natural part to contribute to a much better, less wasteful, waste service.

Soon we won't be sending as many reusable resources to the landfill or spending as much energy as it took the old Composting Facility to compost our waste. We won't be sending so many garbage trailers to Riley, and spending so much fossil fuel. And hopefully, as Edmontonians learn more about the new system, we'll find ways to reduce our waste overall. I'm excited by the idea that I won't have to throw out so many plastic garbage bags that take thousands of years to break down (I can put garbage directly in the bins without plastic bags!) And did you know that 1 in every 3 residences is already composting their own kitchen scraps and yard waste in one way or another? We're becoming more earth-friendly (and soil-friendly) all the time!

That, to me, is a glass-half-full-and-getting-fuller approach to life.

What Edmonton's new residential garbage set out will look like:
A black bin (for garbage), a green bin (and cute little kitchen compost bucket for compostables),
compostable brown paper bags for yard waste, and a good ol' blue bag for recycling.
Household hazardous waste (think paint, batteries, vehicle fluids and chemical cleaners),
electronics, and bulky items will continue to be accepted at Eco Stations.

Simple Suggestion #241... Reduce and reuse those single-use items

I've been thinking a lot about plastic bags lately, mainly because I'm down to my last three recycled bread bags since so much food has been processed or baked and put into the freezer or fridge lately. After watching The Clean Bin Project a few months ago, I find myself looking carefully at every bag, determining whether it's reusable or too holey, and feeling regretful any time I have to throw one out because it's come to the end of its usefulness.

And I'm the same way about a lot of other single-use things. Disposable cups, forks, knives, spoons, napkins (my friend, Supersu, gifts people with these great little portable sets complete with cloth napkin that can go anywhere with her and her friends). Then there are cottage cheese containers, excellent for storing left-overs. Plastic vegetable trays (I'll never buy a full one from Costco again when it's possible to refill it myself!) Ball point pens (why don't they all come with refills?) and markers. Heck, I even use my insulin needles and blood testing lancets more than a few times, much to the horror of some healthcare professionals (but hey, I'm the only one using mine)! And I refuse to buy a coffee unless I have my travel mug along because there's not much worse than seeing single use Tim Horton's and Starbucks garbage blowing down the street. It's the same with getting groceries -- no reusable bags? Take only what I can can carry without the store-offered plastic ones. Their average lifespan is maybe twenty single-use minutes (or less)!

We've become such a disposable society that refusing to use disposables is odd, unusual, strange and counter-cultural. If I was any good at Photoshop, I'd come up with a line of "Rebel with a Cause" posters featuring James Dean with a travel mug on his motorbike. Or maybe Madonna, the original "Material Girl" with a rag bag. I'm sure if I put my thinking cap on, there'd be dozens of other possibilities. How about a "Keep Calm and Reuse (and reuse, and reuse...)" Poster?

Anyway, today's challenge is to look around life and actually see the single-use items that our parents or grandparents never took for granted, but washed and used again, and washed and used again -- and do the same. And in the same vein, not to allow too many of those things into our lives in the first place.

I really ought to get back to baking my own bread, come to think of it...

Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.

Laudato Si: Sunday Reflection #5... What's under the carpet?

This is a real challenge, coming up with these reflections. Not because there's nothing to say, more that reflecting on 5 paragraphs at a time is difficult when they're so dense. Sometimes there's a lot to think about in just a half sentence! I have to hand it to Pope Francis and his team of encyclical letter writers -- they really pack their paragraphs full! So let me encourage you to read Laudato Si for yourself, because the bits and pieces that inspire you might be completely different from what grabs me!

Today I'm looking at paragraphs 17-21 of Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, Chapter One: What is happening to our common home (the entire text can be accessed by clicking here). It's the beginning of a frank assessment of what's actually happening to our environment before getting into the theology and philosophy that could be helpful in determining how to prevent further damage to the only home we have.

Right off the bat in paragraph 18, Pope Francis and friends name "rapidification" as a factor contributing to the planet's problems. Basically, change is happening more rapidly than we or the earth can actually adapt, and keeping up to the pace is stressing everyone and everything. (How many people do you know who say that life is too busy, or that they're moving too fast for their liking?)

For too long, we have gone along with an "irrational confidence in progress and human abilities." The good news is that some of us are starting to see the problems caused by thinking human beings know everything we need to know, and by living in such a hurry all the time. I'll never forget attending a talk by Canadian scientist and TV personality, David Suzuki, in 1989, when he talked about the fallacy of perpetual growth. For me, it was the beginning of critical thinking about the pace of North American life and the different kinds of cancerous-perpetual-growth-pollution appearing around the globe.

Pope Francis is inviting us to review things that we would rather ignore or "sweep under the carpet" in order to "become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it (paragraph 19)." In other words, to continue the theme from last Sunday, we must become more mindful of how our lives impact our planet, its many species, and ourselves. Our ignorance about our lifestyles' repercussions has created problems to which we can no longer turn a blind eye.

The Pope starts by focusing on pollution, naming the many kinds of pollution with which we live (and die -- too often "no measures are taken until after people's health has been irreversibly affected" (paragraph 21)). He points out that the technology we think will save us isn't always capable of seeing the interconnectedness between all things, and as a result, may solve one problem only to replace it with another that was unforeseen! For example, genetically modified crops have produced bigger yields to feed the earth, but have also created disasters for species that are part of the food chain living in or around those crops. And food chains are often linked in unexpected ways...

The most quoted line I noticed in media coverage when the encyclical letter came out in June appears in paragraph 21: "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth." Media outlets all over the world pounced on that line. And it's not just that we find litter in the landscapes we love. The muck from our over-industrialized way of life has found its way into our skies, sea and soil.

It's hard to tell a star from space junk at night. The barges of garbage that have been dumped in our oceans have created the Pacific Gyre, a massive area of plastic bits that float in the area of Midway Island and starve sea life that mistake the trash for food. In the compost I create to enrich the soil in my gardens, I find plastic fruit stickers that take forever to biodegrade, or candy wrappers that blew into the fall leaf collection necessary for making compost. And the tissues in our bodies accumulate the chemical residues of drugs, fertilizers, and flame retardants that get into our water, air and soil -- no wonder the incidence of different forms of cancer seems to be increasing.

It's depressing; I won't lie. But what's more depressing is that so many of us sweep it all under the carpet and go on as if nothing is wrong. We have the power to stop creating so much "filth" by choosing to live more simply, using what we have as well as we can, and demanding that the products we choose are recyclable, or better yet, wasteless (I'm thinking of the endless over-packaging of so many store items). We can avoid single use items like plastic grocery bags, whose average life use is usually only 12 minutes (I refuse to buy groceries if I don't have my reusable bags with me). We can pick up litter even if it isn't ours, as a sign of our love and respect for the earth. These are little things, but if everyone on the planet got in on the act, the mess wouldn't be so overwhelming.

So how are you going to make less of a mess of our planet in the week ahead? How can you encourage those around you to create less garbage and trouble for our sister, Mother Earth?

A while back, we had a little movie night, my family and I, and we learned a few things. The movie was a little Canadian made documentary called "The Clean Bin Project," and I've posted its trailer below (there's also a thought-provoking blog that you can access by clicking here). Grant and Jen challenge each other to see who can produce the least amount of garbage, and their results are quite amazing. Not sure if the movie is available in your neck of the woods, but I'd encourage you to check it out if you can, and do whatever you can to reduce the waste you produce.


We can prevent our earth from garnering more filth, but we all need to do our part. We need to look under our personal carpets and become aware of how we contribute to the suffering on our planet, making that suffering our own rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

As Chris Jordan, the artist in the movie trailer above, says, when we feel something, we act. Pope Francis is inviting us all to feel the suffering caused by the human-made filth that is despoiling creation. He's calling a spade a spade. And I'm maybe jumping the gun a little and inviting us all to reduce our own wastefulness, starting now. What's one less thing you can waste this week?

*******

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth,
so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts
of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.

+AMEN.

(A prayer for our earth and all quotations from Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home © Libreria Editrice Vaticana)

Next up: #6... The elephants in the room

I've never seen a hearse with a trailer hitch, either...

Can't help but like Kristian Bush's new song, Trailer Hitch, for several reasons. If you know me, you'll know why. Mainly, I'm all for giving gently used items to small charities that make a difference in the lives of those in need... one of which I've been known to volunteer for, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

Thanks to Supersu for bringing this catchy tune to my attention!

Simple Suggestion #197... Use every last bit

This is a pretty obvious suggestion... yet I suspect it's something that North Americans, blessed with an overabundance of everything, often forget. We have a tendency to throw things away before they're all used up, and as a result, waste a lot more than we realize.

My toothpaste tube is a case in point. I could have tossed it out two weeks ago because it was ALMOST empty. But sense prevailed, and I decided to see how many more uses I could get out of it. I squeezed the heck out of that sucker, as you can see. I even got my hubby to help squeeze out the last bit because I couldn't manage one-handedly, and his fingers are stronger than mine. I was finally forced to start a new tube last night. Had I thrown this one out when it reached the almost empty stage, two weeks' worth would have gone into the garbage.

And there are so many things like that in our lives... things we haven't used up completely before we toss them out. But if we don't want to use up our planet completely, we need to consider our consumption from all angles, and use every opportunity to avoid waste.

We need to think about...
wearing our clothes til they're no longer wearable, 

repairing every last thing that's repairable,

avoiding the fads and ignoring the trends, 

being model consumers for our families and friends...

So let's eat the last crumb and drink the last drop

and ensure that our waste of our planet will STOP.

What can you be sure to use completely in your life?

*       *       *

Speaking of reducing waste, I want to brag a little more about my cousin Cyla, an artisan whose baby quilt was mentioned in Simple Suggestion #196. As you might remember, she's a quilter extraordinaire (I can't get over her sharp corners and straight seams) and she enjoys reusing fabrics in her works of art (that's what they are). This simple, old fashioned quilt that she made for her own happiness (and use) is made of men's old dress shirts and old white cotton pants that she got from her local thrift shop. It reminds me of my two dads, and Cyla says it reminds her of her quilter grandmas. God bless our quilter grandmas for memories like this. I think it's gorgeous, even though it's not quite finished, and I fully intend to visit Cyla, and see her, and it, in person.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.

Simple Suggestion #164... Save your eggshells (and other things)

My hubby found a wasp in our mailbox yesterday, so I was tempted to just remoodle last May 15th's Simple Suggestion #121, Put up a wasp-scarer -- after all, 'tis the season when they start nesting. But you can click on the link above if you missed it the first time around.

I have a different suggestion for today -- one that comes out of all my planting yesterday. I put in 33 tomato plants, with a little bed of crushed eggshells around their stems, to discourage cutworms and slugs. Eggshells are calcium, a mineral that tomato plants appreciate, and they make life miserable for slugs, so I use them pretty liberally wherever I plant lettuce and other veggies that slugs consider tender vittles. That's why there's always a pail under my sink in which we save our eggshells -- why give them to waste management when they're actually a valuable garden resource?

And while I'm at it, it's a good time to consider other valuable waste-like garden resources that too many of us leave for our garbage collectors to drag away... After last year's successful "Tired of Dragging Your Grass" campaign, the City of Edmonton has just started a "Go Bagless" or "Leave it on the Lawn" campaign to remind homeowners that

-- Leaving clippings on your lawn is good for it. (Some people think clippings are unsightly and bag them, but they disappear quickly through nature's simple recycling process, which is much better than the wasteful human process of bagging and shipping them to the dump!)
-- Grass clippings help the soil to retain moisture. 
-- Grass clippings quickly decompose, naturally fertilizing your lawn after each mow (the nitrogen in cut grass goes back into the soil better than chemical fertilizer that has to be watered...)
-- It's less work for you - by Going Bagless for one summer, you can save up to a full day of your time.
-- No more bagging and dragging up to 60 bags of grass to the curb each year.
-- It's safer for your garbage collector, too! In the growing season about half of all the waste collected is grass. Each collector picks up waste from about 700 homes each day. Heavy bags of grass increase the risk of injuries to garbage collectors; if you need to bag your grass, keep bags under 20 kg. 
-- Grasscycling is better for the environment, and is one of the easiest, most effective ways of reducing waste.

And if all this doesn't float your boat, here's something worth a thought:

-- The CO2 emissions saved if everyone in Edmonton grasscycled would be equal to the annual CO2 emissions of 24,686 cars! 
-- The water saved would be equal to 1814 Olympic sized swimming pools!

On other waste-reducing fronts, these days our autumn leaves are providing an excellent mulch for my perennials. They're another natural resource that's not nearly so costly to our wallets or our forest resources as fancy chip mulches... plus they're essential for composting.

So I guess today's suggestion(s) is (are) more for people who like to garden... but even people who don't might consider their own ways to reduce our waste load... maybe you can share your waste resources with others who do have gardens -- or perhaps, spread the gospel of grasscycling.

My thanks to Mark S-A from the City of Edmonton's Waste Services for sharing this info.

Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.

Re-moodling: Simple Suggestion #112... Try winter composting

I've never been a huge fan of re-runs, and I promise I won't be recycling my ideas very often in this space. But now that winter has definitely arrived where I live, I'm thinking it's probably a good idea to re-moodle about winter composting, seeing as I sort of missed the boat last year by posting Simple Suggestion #112 in mid-February, when winter was on the decline. Winter composting isn't any more work than composting the rest of the year, really. In fact, it's probably less work, because if you can put your organic waste outside in a cold climate, you don't really have to do the work until spring! What follows is a re-run, but one worth considering:

Simple Suggestion #112... Try winter composting 
(Thursday, February 16, 2012)

I really should have moodled about this back in October, but didn't think of it until a few weeks ago, because of a conversation with my neighbour. He was cutting my hair, and he mentioned that he had saved a few bags of autumn leaves for me and my composting efforts. We got into a discussion about how I planned to add them to my compost pile because composting actually requires five to twenty times more "browns" (carbon material like dry leaves) than "greens" (higher nitrogen kitchen peelings, etc.), and he said, "but you won't be composting until spring, will you?"

He was very surprised when I started talking about winter composting, because he didn't realize it could be done. I explained that in our cold climate it's just fine to toss our kitchen scraps out on the compost pile because they usually just freeze solid until spring.

If the pile starts to get a bit smelly as it melts, I just add leaves on top as a bit of a "fragrance filter," but it's not usually an issue before it really warms up and I have a chance to get out and start stirring more leaves into the mess.

I also told my neighbour about folks I know who keep a plastic-lined garbage can near their back doors for fruit and veggie scraps.

They just keep piling the scraps in there through the winter, and in the spring they have a soupy mess to pour into their compost bin with leaves and other fall yard waste. The freezing and thawing actually makes the kitchen waste break down more quickly, and they get compost a lot sooner. My neighbour sounded interested in trying his own winter composting, so I might not get my bags of leaves from him in the spring. But that's okay. I'm a leaf thief, and I have lots stored up already...

For unsqueamish people, there's also another way to winter compost, involving a few friends imported from the Carolinas. In our basement, we have a condominium for red wiggler worms, all very neat and well contained.

Most of the time, we forget they're there, but every couple of weeks, they're happy to receive our kitchen waste, and they turn it into the best compost you can imagine. They don't require a lot of effort, and they're not even that gross!

I spent a little time with them this afternoon, giving them carrot peel and kiwi skin snacks to keep them happy. I line the bins up in a row, make a little space for the kitchen scraps, and cover them over with compost again. Voila, waste taken care of in a couple of weeks by hungry red wigglers.

Before I put the lids back on the worm bins, I always tuck them in with a sheet of newspaper. That way, if there are any fruit flies among my banana peels, their life cycle is cut short because they can't get past the newspaper. Works like magic! The far bin is already tucked in, as you can see.

Those are my two ways to compost during the winter. In the spring, my garden benefits from all the work my composter and red wigglers have done over the winter... and during the winter, my houseplants are happy when I put a bit of vermicompost into their drinking water (1 tbsp/litre). It's like a vitamin booster for plants.

Soil gives us so much fantastic food... and composting, winter and summer, is my way to give something back so good things can keep growing.

Any questions? Just ask.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.

Simple Suggestion #112... Try winter composting

I really should have moodled about this back in October, but didn't think of it until a few weeks ago, in conversation with my neighbour. He was cutting my hair, and he mentioned that he had saved a few bags of autumn leaves for me and my composting efforts. We got into a discussion about how I planned to add them to my compost pile because composting actually requires five times more "browns" (carbon material) than "greens" (higher nitrogen kitchen peelings, etc.), and he said, "but you won't be composting until spring, will you?"

He was very surprised when I started talking about winter composting, because he didn't realize it could be done. I explained that in our cold climate it's just fine to toss our kitchen scraps out on the compost pile because they usually just freeze solid until spring.

If the pile starts to get a bit smelly as it melts, I just add leaves on top as a bit of a "fragrance filter," but it's not usually an issue before it really warms up and I have a chance to get out and start stirring more leaves into the mess.

I also told my neighbour about folks I know who keep a plastic-lined garbage can near their back doors for fruit and veggie scraps.

They just keep piling the scraps in there through the winter, and in the spring they have a soupy mess to pour into their compost bin with leaves and other fall yard waste. The freezing and thawing actually makes the kitchen waste break down more quickly, and they get compost a lot sooner. My neighbour sounded interested in trying his own winter composting, so I might not get my bags of leaves from him in the spring. But that's okay. I'm a leaf thief, and I have lots stored up already...

For unsqueamish people, there's also another way to winter compost, involving a few friends imported from the Carolinas. In our basement, we have a condominium for red wiggler worms, all very neat and well contained.

Most of the time, we forget they're there, but every couple of weeks, they're happy to receive our kitchen waste, and they turn it into the best compost you can imagine. They don't require a lot of effort, and they're not even that gross!

I spent a little time with them this afternoon, giving them carrot peel and kiwi skin snacks to keep them happy. I line the bins up in a row, make a little space for the kitchen scraps, and cover them over with compost again. Voila, waste taken care of in a couple of weeks by hungry red wigglers.

Before I put the lids back on the worm bins, I always tuck them in with a sheet of newspaper. That way, if there are any fruit flies among my banana peels, their life cycle is cut short because they can't get past the newspaper. Works like magic! The far bin is already tucked in, as you can see.

So those are my two ways to compost during the winter. In the spring, my garden benefits from all the work my composter and red wigglers have done over the winter... and during the winter, my houseplants are happy when I put a bit of vermicompost into their drinking water. It's like a vitamin booster for plants.

Soil gives us so much fantastic food... and composting, winter and summer, is my way to give something back so good things can keep growing.

Any questions? Just ask.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.