The FreeCycle Network is made up of almost 5,000 regional groups, with a total of nearly 9 million members. Happily our region is represented, with FreeCycle Illawarra.

The way it works is you first join up to your regional group, and then you’ll start receiving emails. Some will be people wanting things, some will be people offering things. You can only offer things for free (no money can change hands!), and all items must be legal and appropriate for all ages.

A few other local bloggers are active on FreeCycle, including NellyMary and Rich & Ally.

So, here are some of the cool things I’ve been able to pick up…

Lots of firewood. A guy at Gerringong had some trees fall down on his property, so I went down and cut them up with my chainsaw and brought back many trailer loads. I’m still splitting it, but we won’t go cold for a few winters!

A dog kennel.

A stainless steel BBQ plate. It’s very heavy and quite thick, so it’ll go great on a traditional stone-sided wood-fired barbie.

While collecting the above BBQ plate, I noticed the guy had a pile of scrap metal in his front yard waiting for the recycler. He said I could take whatever I wanted. These galvanised flues, and the capped flue below, will be great for building a wood-fired pizza oven like Gavin’s cob oven!

I’ve also given away some stuff on FreeCycle – a microwave and a few other small things.

So how about you – have you used FreeCycle? What did you give away or get?

Related posts:

1. Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge Launches!
2. Chicken Sellers In The Illawarra
3. Upcoming Illawarra Seedsavers Meeting

Last week we had a truckload of mulch delivered from the Dunmore waste depot. It cost about $115 to have them deliver 9 cubic metres (12 cubic yards, or 4.6 tons), which I think is money well spent. Apparently you can go and fill your trailer with the stuff for free, but look at my trailer compared to the pile. I think it would have taken at least 10-15 trips to drag home that much mulch, and I would have had to do all the shovelling myself!

Can you see the steam rising out of the top of the pile? It’s partially composted, but still pretty hot.

And here’s a close-up to give you an idea of the structure and composition of the mulch. It’s made up of all the municipal green waste, shredded and partially composted. There’s a good mix of fine compost and larger chunks in it. There’s also more plastic and bits of painted wood than I’d like, but not enough to be a big concern. I can pick most of it out as I use the mulch.

So what am I going to do with all this mulch?

I’ve been digging some new garden beds, and in between them I’ve dug deep paths on contour. The paths are about a foot deep, and I dug that soil onto the beds to make them a little higher. In the bottom of the trenches I’m laying down cardboard (to smother any kikuyu grass that tries to grow back), and then filling them with this mulch.

Because the paths are on contour, they hold water when it rains and act like swales. The mulch soaks up the water and forms a reservoir, but because it’s loose and chunky the surface is still fine to walk on. The water will then be released to the surrounding garden beds slowly over the following week or two, reducing the need to water. As the plants in the beds get bigger, their roots will seek out the moisture in the paths and hopefully grow nice and deep and strong.

Normally you’d shy away from putting so much woody matter on garden beds for fear of locking up nitrogen in the soil. But the paths are between the beds, so the soil in the beds will not be affected. In addition, mycelium (fungi) will colonise the mulch paths. Plant roots and soil microorganisms work together with the mycelium to feed each other, for the benefit of the growing plants.

When the mulch in the paths eventually breaks down, it can be dug onto the garden beds as a rich humus dressing, and new mulch can be laid in the paths again.

Rob over at One Straw has a great explanation of the concept, which he calls pit and mound gardening.

It’s kind of like a mini swale/hugelkultur – garden paths don’t have to be unproductive!

I’ll post some photos soon. Hopefully I’ll get to do some more work on the garden beds over the weekend.

Related posts:

1. Jamberoo Community Growers – Don Cairns Talk
2. Rotary Hoe Advice?
3. Swale And Banana Circle

The NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) has a good fact sheet on swill feeding. I’ve summarised some of the info below for interest, but don’t rely on my wording – read the original for yourself if you’re planning to keep pigs!

What is swill?

What can’t you feed to pigs?

• any meat products (e.g. pies, cheese and bacon rolls, table scraps, etc)
• carcases or parts of mammals or birds (including meat, bones, blood, offal, etc)
• manure from mammals or birds
• household, commercial or industrial waste (e.g. restaurant waste, old cooking oil)
• anything that has been in contact with any of the above (e.g. by being kept in a reused takeaway food container, being prepared on a surface that was previously used to prepare meat, etc)

So what can you feed to pigs?

• milk and eggs
• fish
• tallow and gelatine
• manufactured dry dog or cat food
• dry meal made from meat, blood, bone or feathers, processed by commercial hot rendering (people use this as a source of protein)
• non-meat bakery waste
• fruit, vegetable or cereal waste
• vegetable oil or oilseed waste that has not been used for cooking

What’s wrong with feeding pigs swill?

Meat and meat products can be processed and fit for human consumption, but still contain certain animal viruses. Humans are not affected by them, so there’s no food quality or health issue, but animals eating these products could pick up the disease.

With food being imported from all over the world, there’s a veritable smorgasboard of diseases that could be introduced. Some of the serious possibilities include: foot-and-mouth disease, swine vesicular disease, African swine fever, classical swine fever, and trichinellosis.

Thanks to our physical isolation from the rest of the world Australia is relatively disease-free, and it’s important to our primary industries that we maintain that.

This applies to feral pigs too!

It only takes one feral pig to pick up a disease from a discarded salami wrapper and we could have a major outbreak (foot-and-mouth virus can be carried over 10 km just on the wind!).

But didn’t people used to feed all their scraps to pigs?

I believe that it wouldn’t be such a problem in a more localised economy. If all your food was coming from your local area, then your meat scraps wouldn’t be a potential vector to bring in new diseases from afar. Any disease they contained would already be present locally!

With the current global economy, food can be imported from anywhere in the world. The diseases and pathogens that can can come along with it are unlimited.

That’s why we now need to be a lot more careful in how we raise and feed our animals. Plus you could be fined up to $11,000 for breaking the rules!

Related posts:

1. The Pigs Escaped!
2. The Big Pig Project 2010
3. Electric Fence Keeps Pigs In!

I’ve previously published about my own experience of switching from low-voltage halogen downlights to CFL downlights

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had several people express concern to me that the mercury in a CFL poses a serious health risk if it gets broken, or represents a major environmental threat. Rest assured, the mercury concern has been blown out of all proportion by people opposed to the switch.

1. How often do you break lightbulbs?I can only think of twice in the past 10 years or so that I’ve even been near a broken bulb. If the bulb isn’t broken, no mercury is released.
2. There’s very little mercury in each bulb.The amount of mercury contained in each globe is very small (about 3-5 milligrams), or enough to cover the tip of a ballpoint pen. A tiny watch battery contains 5 times as much mercury, and we don’t seem too concerned about carrying them around on our wrist all day. Mercury thermometers contain about 100 times that amount (500 milligrams), and again we seem happy to keep using them.
3. Most of the mercury won’t vaporise.If a CFL bulb is broken most of the mercury remains on the glass and is not actually released into the air. Inhalation of mercury vapour is much worse than skin contact or even ingestion.

Interestingly, the amount of coal burned to generate the additional energy used by an incandescent bulb over its lifetime would release 5 times more mercury into the environment than is contained in the CFL bulb that replaced it (source: The Environmental Engineer journal 2006). So even if the worst case happened and CFLs were dumped into landfill and not recycled, the net release of mercury into the environment would be less if we all switched.

Of course, you should dispose of old CFL bulbs properly. Contact your local Council to ask about collection programmes, or refer to the Australian federal Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts web site.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has a pretty good explanation of this topic.

For a very thorough scientific assessment of the risks, see the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Health And Environmental Risks’ document Opinion on Mercury in Certain Energy-Saving Light Bulbs.

Related posts:

1. Cleaning Up Broken CFLs
2. Converting Halogen Downlights To CFLs
3. Swap Lightbulbs For CFLs For Free

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 what to do.

The best instructions I found were from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) web site. To summarise (this is for hard surfaces, like the garage floor):

1. Before anything else, air out the room for 15 minutes (easy, I got sidetracked and spent half an hour on the computer answering emails!).
2. Scoop up the glass pieces using stiff paper and place them in a sealed plastic bag (don’t use a broom or vacuum – you don’t want mercury getting airborne where you can breathe it in).
3. Use sticky tape to pick up the remaining tiny glass fragments and powder.
4. Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels.
5. Place all cleanup materials into the plastic bag, seal it, and then seal the whole lot in a second plastic bag.
6. Store the sealed bag of waste somewhere safe outside the house until you can dispose of it safely. Kiama area residents can drop it to Council’s Lamp Recycling Program at the Minnamurra Waste Depot. Other areas, contact your local Council to find out how to best dispose of it.
7. Wash your hands thoroughly after the cleanup.

So, does this mean that CFLs pose a significant health risk?

I don’t believe so. There are lots of things people use in modern life that can impact our health if not handled correctly, from printer toner to potting mix. As long as you are aware of the hazard, handle the item or substance properly, and know how to deal with a spill safely, then the risk is minimal. More thoughts here: CFLs and Mercury.

(Image credit: http://www.test4mercury.com/BrokenCFL.htm)

Related posts:

1. Swap Lightbulbs For CFLs For Free
2. Converting Halogen Downlights To CFLs
3. Could Kiama Ban Plastic Bags?

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/h2oalchemist/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

People are upgrading to flat-screen TVs in record numbers, leaving them with huge unwanted CRT TVs taking up space in the garage. The rapid rate at which computers, mobile phones, DVD players, games consoles, GPS units and other gadgets are released and then obsoleted means they’re piling up around the TVs in the garage too.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/ / CC BY 2.0

At the moment, not much. Waste centers are starting to charge to take these items, because they have to be handled separately from the rest of the waste stream. Most charities are refusing them as donations, since they already have excesses of unwanted old gear.

My employer recently had to get rid of several pallets full of old computer and electronic equipment that had no value to anyone. To their credit, they have a policy that it must be disposed of ethically. It turned out to be very difficult to find anyone to take it, though. Our company disposal policy won’t allow it to be sent to developing countries for recycling, due to concerns about massive pollution in poorer areas and the use of child labour. Disposal options within Australia can be expensive and are hard to find.

This whole e-waste issue came up as a topic for discussion at the last Kiama Sustainability Advisory Committee meeting. There’s a real fear that with tips charging extra for disposing of these items and Councils refusing to take them in the normal kerbside cleanups, people will start dumping them illegally. In fact, in just the last three weeks I’ve seen 5 different TVs dumped on the roadside – 3 around Wollongong, 1 in Dapto, and 1 on Jamberoo Pass.

Kiama Council is left with a real problem on how to deal with ewaste. Sure, the Federal Government is planning a nationwide ewaste collection solution by the end of 2011, but that’s a long way off and we all know how common it is for government solutions to be delayed.

Should Council collect ewaste from residents and store it in a warehouse somewhere while we wait for the national scheme? There are serious health and safety issues with handling and stacking all that toxic waste, not to mention the cost involved. And if the Federal ewaste program gets delayed or cancelled, Council will be left to dispose of the ever-growing stockpile at its own cost.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/sharkbait/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Or perhaps Council could just run an awareness campaign about the upcoming 2011 Australian ewaste disposal scheme, and ask people to be patient and store this stuff for a little while longer.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: So what can we do with old TVs today?

What do you think? Do you have any good ideas for other ewaste options? Please post them in the comments below!

Related posts:

1. Swap Lightbulbs For CFLs For Free
2. Kiama Council Composting Workshop

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 so, and there is a Land And Sea – Plastic Free page on the Council website, but not much seems to have happened in this area.

Huskisson, just an hour or so down the coast (and the town where I grew up!), has done it. They have a fairly similar tourist-driven local economy, so most of the issues they overcame should be similar to ours.

What do you think? Could Kiama get rid of plastic bags? How might we do it?

Related posts:

1. I’m On The Kiama Sustainability Advisory Committee!
2. Kiama Council Composting Workshop
3. Kiama Sustainability Advisory Committee – First Meeting

Quite a while ago (like, 8 years ago!), I was buying some lucerne for the garden at the feed store at Albion Park Rail and I noticed they had a few large PVC drums stacked in the corner. I asked about them and they were waiting to be recycled, so I bought one for $25.

It was a struggle to fit the barrel and the lucerne bales in my little hatchback car, but I managed to get the lot home. I drilled some holes around the barrel to let air in and water out. About 5 mm holes are pretty good – much bigger and you’ll get pests in there and compost will fall out.

Using the DIY tumbling compost bin is dead easy. You just fill it with lawn clippings, manure, stable sweepings, leaves, comfrey, and garden prunings put through a shredder. I don’t put strappy leaves or twigs or long grass in there, as they tend to tangle up into a ball and don’t break down very quickly. Chopped up or shredded, though, they do fine. I also get the waste coffee grounds from our coffee machine at work – these are high in nitrogen and excellent for the compost (plus it’s diverting them from the waste stream). Paper from the office shredder is a great carbon source, too.

It’s usually a good idea to add a bit of lime, blood and bone, and a shovel or two of fresh compost to seed the bacteria and micro-organisms. Then give the lot a good watering and seal the lid.

Every morning and evening, I roll the compost barrel around the yard a bit to mix up the contents, and add a little water if it’s getting too dry. It just sits in the sun all day. For the first week or so, the compost gets really hot – so much so that it often steams when you open it. This is great, as it kills off any seeds and pest eggs that happen to be in there.

The compost only takes a month or two to mature, depending upon the materials you started with. If you don’t get the carbon/nitrogen balance right, don’t keep it moist, don’t mix it up regularly, or don’t start with well-chopped ingredients it will take somewhat longer.

The thing I like most about the DIY tumbling compost bin is its portability. You roll it to where your ingredients are when filling it, and once it’s done you roll it to where you want to empty it and just tip it up.

I’m now busily trying to make as much rich compost as I can over the winter, so I can top up all the garden beds and be ready for spring. I’ve been using this compost barrel for about 8 years now (yes, the photo to the right is that old!), and it’s still going strong. I bet if I’d bought one of those $300 commercial tumbling compost bins it’d be broken by now!

One thing to note – if you’re going to use a drum or barrel to make compost like this, find out what it has been used for previously. Mine is an old olive barrel that had also been used to store horse feed. You definitely don’t want to use one that has been used to store chemicals, oil, or some other nasty substance.

Update: An Illawarra supplier of these types of barrels is Drum Master.

Related posts:

1. Growing Mushrooms From Spent Mushroom Compost
2. Kiama Council Composting Workshop

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, roof insulation or a number of other items.

OK, maybe I’m a bit cheeky calling this stuff ‘free’. Some certainly is (like the free roof insulation), but some you will still have to pay something for after collecting the rebates. But with Rudd’s latest stimulus package just being passed, most Australians will be receiving enough cash to cover those remaining costs!

Or you could spend the money on some fruit trees, or on setting up a vegetable garden, or even just use it to fund a switch to green energy for a decade or so.

None of us were budgeting for these handouts a fortnight ago, so why not spend it on something to reduce the running costs of your home, enhance its resale value, increase your quality of life, and reduce your environmental footprint? Surely that’s a great way to spend a bunch of money that just fell into our collective laps?!

How are you going to spend your Rudd bonus? Share your ideas in the comments!

Photo by Ed Bacchus.

Related posts:

1. Know Your Government Rebates!
2. Cheap Grid-Connected Solar Power: $2500 for 1 kW System
3. Swap Lightbulbs For CFLs For Free

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 if you’re thinking of retrofitting some sustainable modifications to your house, so check them out and make sure you claim back what you’re entitled to!

The state-specific pages are: NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, with NT and ACT to come when I finish the research.

If you know of any rebates that I’ve missed in all this, please leave a comment below and I’ll update the pages.

Related posts:

1. Cheap Grid-Connected Solar Power: $2500 for 1 kW System
2. Solar Power On It’s Way!
3. Gross Solar Feed In Tariff Petition For Australia

The topic of the show was Waste. You can find the episode here (it’s episode 7, 3 Nov 2008), or download the mp4 directly here. Note: the ABC rocks for making their shows available on their web site!

It was an interesting group discussion on the topic of waste, and care for the environment generally. Ally and Richard’s house was featured as an example of people living sustainably within modern society.

I found the ‘anti’ guy annoying. His whole argument seemed to be that he couldn’t be bothered doing anything, one person can’t make any difference, and the government or business or someone should do something about it instead of him. It made the discussion a bit lopsided, having one of the positions so weak.

Still, the overall message was quite positive, and it emphasised the point that small changes made by a lot of people can have a large cumulative effect on the problems we face.

No related posts.

What a great event!

I had really thought I wouldn’t learn much from this workshop, but I thought it was a good opportunity to meet some interesting people and maybe pick up a few little tips. It turned out to be full of useful information, and well worthwhile.

Kiama Council is currently doing random audits of household rubbish put out for roadside collection. They’re doing 260 samples across the municipality to get a handle on what kinds of waste people are generating and whether they’re recycling properly.

They’ve found that around 63% of household waste in Kiama is organic, and therefore potentially compostable. That seems really high to me, but they’ve sampled and measured it and that’s the figure.

Anyway, on with the composting tips…

All the compost info you read talks about ‘greens’ and ‘browns’. Greens supply nitrogen, and browns supply carbon. You generally want 1 part green to 2 parts brown to get complete breakdown. Too much green and your compost will go slimy, acidic and smelly. Too much brown and it won’t break down very quickly.

It’s good to compost your weeds, since they’re plant matter and will break down nicely. However, if your compost heap doesn’t get hot enough to kill the seeds, you’ll have weeds sprouting everywhere you spread the compost. To get around this, put all your weeds in a bucket. Pour boiling water over them until they’re just covered, then leave for two weeks or so. Pour off the water and use it as a liquid fertiliser, and tip the remains of the weeds into your compost. The seeds won’t survive this treatment! And if you want extra ‘green’ points, rather than boiling up all that water using electricity, use one of those outdoor solar shower thingies to heat the water.

Collecting seaweed from beaches in Kiama is legal, as long as you keep it to less than 5 kg at a time. I had heard elsewhere that it was illegal in NSW, but Josephine assured us she’d done the research and it was OK. You just rinse the seaweed off and dry it on the clothesline for a few days, then add it to your compost as a ‘brown’. Seaweed is great for adding trace elements that are often missing from other sources of compostable material.

Tumbling bins are OK, although they generally don’t let in as many beneficial microorganisms and other critters because they’re not in contact with the ground. One way to improve this is to make a compost tea from your traditional compost (just put a few handfuls of compost into a hessian sack and sit it in a bucket of water for a few days), then water the tumbling compost bin with that. It’ll introduce lots of beneficial Effective Microorganisms (EMs) and help break the compost down quicker.

Some people mentioned problems with kikuyu grass growing into their compost bins. One way to prevent that is to grow comfrey all around the base of the bin. Comfrey is a great barrier to grasses, is great for adding to the compost as an activator, and it will slurp up any nutrients leaching out of the bottom of your compost bin.

Josephine recommended you not compost rhubarb leaves because they’re poisonous. This alarmed me, because I’ve always put them in. A bit of research (e.g. here) showed that it’s actually OK, as long as they are composted completely. The poison in rhubarb leaves is oxalic acid. This breaks down in the composting process pretty quickly, and won’t cause problems for either the compost heap or the garden when the compost is spread out.

The worm farming part of the talk was interesting, although not much new information. It is interesting to note that the worms don’t actually eat the scraps you’re putting in, they feed on the microorganisms that eat the scraps. Also, blending the scraps before putting them in can greatly speed up their consumption.

I was amazed to learn that underneath Shellharbour Workers’ Club is a massive worm farm! All of their organic waste from kitchens etc is dropped down into the worms, and a guy comes 2 or 3 times a week to check up on everything and keep it all chugging along. Presumably he sells the worm castings or something.

The final part of the Composting Workshop was on Bokashi, and this seemed to be what nearly everyone was there for. I had read about it before, but was interested to learn more and to see it in action.

Councils all over the place provide subsidised compost bins and worm farms to their constituents, but Kiama Council is the only council in Australia that also provides Bokashi supplies.

Bokashi is basically a way of fermenting kitchen waste in an airtight bucket. You put in your scraps, push it down to exclude as much air as possible, then sprinkle the Bokashi grains (a special grain mix innoculated with EMs to to start the fermentation and breakdown process), then seal up the Bokashi bucket. Every couple of days, you add more scraps and grains and seal it up again.

Over time, Bokashi juice collects in the bottom of the bucket. This can be drained off via the tap on the bucket, and is an excellent plant fertiliser (diluted well, 1:100). The juice is also apparently good as a drain cleaner or a septic system activator.

Once the bucket is full of kitchen waste, it is left to ferment for another couple of weeks and then buried in the garden. When it hits the soil, earthworms and other creatures will come from miles around to feast on it, and it is broken down within a few weeks. Many people bury it in a trench in their vegie patch, and then plant over the top of it to give the plants a good boost.

Council sells the Bokashi buckets for $70 each to Kiama residents (they’re normally $99), and the grain refills for $7 per kilo. Hmm, perhaps they’d make good Christmas presents…

Oh, and we also got some swag for attending. We got a voucher for a free compost bin, a KiamaSphere coffee cup, and a reusable fabric shopping bag containing packets of flower and vegetable seeds, a pen and pad, a nice folder for keeping handouts in, and a bunch of handouts and brochures on composting and other environmental initiatives. Cool!

Related posts:

1. Opportunities