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 [...]

This is a post I wrote a while ago on my personal blog, but I think it’s really appropriate here. Plus I still don’t have much time to post anything new yet.

Don’t you hate it when you know you’ve seen something in a video (say, Bill Mollison talking about planting in guilds), but you can’t [...]

A little while ago I mentioned that I was interviewed for a podcast by Tim Denshire-Key.

Tim is a student from RMIT who has been travelling around Australia, checking out sustainability initiatives and interviewing people. He’s finally back home and working his way through the 50+ interviews he recorded. What a huge job!

Well, my turn has [...]

The “Kev’s Patch” campaign is gaining momentum! I’ve teamed up with a couple of other bloggers (Gavin from The Greening of Gavin and Julie from Go Greener Australia) to set up a new site promoting the initiative – the Kev’s Patch blog.

I love that header image above that Julie did for us!

If you think it’s [...]

In our never-ending quest for more gardening space, I’m thinking of building some raised beds on top of the concrete in our backyard. A 2-foot-deep bed around the edge of the area wouldn’t impact our usable space much (we already have pots etc all around the edges), but would give us a fair bit of [...]

Yesterday I met up with Tim Denshire-Key at Wollongong University, and he interviewed me about our participation in the Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge and our efforts to become more sustainable in an ordinary suburban house. He’ll use the audio in an upcoming podcast.

Tim is studying Industrial Design at RMIT in Melbourne, and is currently undertaking [...]

Tonight we had a couple of kangaroo mini-roasts for dinner, bought from our local Woolworths supermarket.

I’ve eaten kangaroo many times before, and like it just as much as beef. Megan has never been quite so keen, simply because it’s kangaroo. However, we both enjoyed this pre-packaged roast. It was quick and easy to cook, and [...]

One of the big energy hogs in our house is our clunky old second fridge in the garage. I measured its energy consumption with the MS6115 power meter, and it uses a whopping 2.5 kWh/day!

Many Aussie houses have one of these beasts, which is a big reason why the NSW State Government is now offering [...]

60 Minutes recently ran a story titled Backyard Revolution, about the growing (pardon the pun!) movement towards backyard vegie patches. Finally TV stations are joining us in the 21st century, so if you missed it you can watch the story here.

The story featured one of Australia’s most-loved TV gardening presenters, Peter Cundall, talking about the [...]

On Sunday, I visited John Burgess at his home in Gerringong. John is the owner of Fresh By Nature, the official NSW distributor for Backyard Aquaponics systems. He is also active in the Backyard Aquaponics Forum, the biggest and most active aquaponics forum in the world with almost 2,500 registered members, and aquaponics systems all [...]