FreeCycle is a great way to give a new life to stuff you no longer want, and to divert still-useful waste from landfill tips. Here are some of the useful things I’ve picked up…

We had 9 cubic metres (4.6 tons) of mulch delivered – and I have to move it all by wheelbarrow!

There was a little bit of discussion about feeding scraps to pigs on my original entry about our pig project. There are quite strict laws around the feeding of scraps and waste to pigs in Australia (and many other countries), and you really need to make sure you’re doing the right thing.

The NSW Department of [...]

Australia, and many other countries around the world, are legislating to phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs. It is estimated that this initiative will reduce Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by 800,000 tonnes of CO2-e; not bad, but it’s still only 0.14% of our total emissions. That said, any saving is progress.

I’ve [...]

Not long ago I dropped and broke a compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) in the garage. D’oh!

I had a vague recollection that there’s a procedure you should follow to safely clean up broken CFLs, due to the small amount of mercury inside them. So, geek that I am, I jumped on the computer to look up [...]

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/h2oalchemist/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 The proper disposal of ewaste (electronic waste – old TVs, stereos, computers, faxes, printers, etc) is becoming a significant issue. These products contain toxic materials such as lead, cadmium, beryllium and brominated flame retardents.

People are upgrading to flat-screen TVs in record numbers, leaving them with huge unwanted CRT TVs [...]

We had another meeting of the Kiama Council Sustainability Advisory Committee tonight, and as always it was a fascinating and stimulating discussion.

One of the topics that came up was the question of whether Kiama could ditch plastic bags. There was a newspaper article in October last year where the Council announced its intention to do [...]

Don’t spend hundreds of dollars on a store-bought tumbling compost bin – you can make one yourself for $25!

If you live in Australia, did you know that you can now access green retrofits for your house for free?

Check out all the sustainable retrofit rebates available here in Australia. Make sure you scroll to the bottom and find your state ones, too.

You could get a rainwater tank, a solar hot water system, solar electricity, [...]

You may have noticed that I’ve just added a new page to the menu bar above these posts, Australian Rebates.

I’ve tried to collect all the information I could find on Australian federal rebate programs, as well as all the different rebate schemes for the various states. There are a lot of good opportunities in there [...]