Reusable barrier bags

Do you know what a 'barrier bag' is?

You might not be familiar with the terminology, but chances are you are very familiar with the item: the single-use lightweight plastic bags that are available on rolls when you buy fruit and veg, or whole foods, so your apples and potatoes don't get in a muddle in the trolley.

I have for some years now tried not to use these bags, keeping items loose wherever practical. However, while it might be OK to have a few onions rolling around, soft things like stone fruit or small things like almonds really need something to contain them.

For my birthday last month, my caring and ever-thoughtful mother-in-law made me a set of cloth barrier bags. They are a simple rectangle, in various sizes, with a ribbon draw-string. The fabric is silk voile (lace curtaining) which means the checkout staff can see what is in each bag. 

So our May commitment is to remember to use them! We also intend to use paper bags to cover any excess need, to be added to compost when they become unusable. Fruit and veg shops generally provide paper bags for mushrooms, and they can easily be adapted for other uses. The wonderful Kakulus Sister in Fremantle provides them for their dry goods in general, which gave me the idea.

We also use these bags for storing some fruit and veg in the fridge, which so far seems to be working fine. There will be a few things that are very powdery for which we will have to use paper, as I think flour or the like would not quite be contained.

Initial Time: For me, zero. I'm not sure how long it took Tyson's mum to make them. She's very good at sewing, but even if you were less skilled it is a simple project. 

Initial Cost: For me, zero. To make yourself: simple ribbons generally cost $3-$5 a metre, although they also seem to turn up on all sorts of things, so if you are not picky about making them match you can probably find some around the house. Or use string. Wool. Old shoelaces. Whatever you can salvage. Fabric prices vary widely, but at say $10/metre your bags would cost about $1 each.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Remembering to take them and use them. They are stored with our cloth shopping bags, so in theory this is easy, but we are taking a while to get into the groove. Occasionally they need to be washed after use (mostly not). When empty, they need to be returned to their storage place rather than binned. 

Impact: 

Australians use approximately four billion single-use shopping bags a year. The average useful life of those bags is twelve minutes. Around 86% end up in landfill, where even if they are supposedly compostable they do not really break down, due to the highly compacted nature of landfill. Although most people report using plastic bags two or three times before disposing of them, ultimately they still end up in the bin. The remainder end up as litter, choking up our environment and particularly damaging waterways. Marine life is severely impacted by plastic waste. Once the bags begin to deteriorate, they contribute to 'micro plastics' - microscopic plastic fibres that are being found in sea creatures in increasing quantities. Including sea creatures we eat. 

At the other end of the process, producing plastic bags is a polluting process using non-renewable resources. China banned plastic bags in 2008 and it is reported to have saved 1.6 million tonnes of oil the following year.

I estimate that our family uses around 260 barrier bags in a year. There is some environmental cost in producing the cloth bags. Choice has calculated that a green shopping bag needs to be used 23 times before its production footprint is less than the equivalent in plastic. Given that our bags are of polyester fabric, I imagine we need to use them at least 23 times and probably a few more, so we pull ahead after about one year of use. 

While researching to write this post I discovered that a government campaign in 2003-2007 to phase out plastic shopping bags, which I had thought was ongoing, ceased in 2008. Plastic bag use leapt 17% the same year. Some States have gone on alone to regulate against single-use plastic, but not Western Australia. After this election I think I will write to whoever forms government to remind them that quite a lot of people would like those bags banned. If China, Rwanda and Bangladesh can do it, surely we can manage here?

Links/ References:

Discussion paper on phasing out plastic bags in Western Australia (2014)

Choice article discussing options for sustainable shopping bags (2014)

NSW EPA discussion paper on plastic bags (2016)

Using construction waste

In our neighbourhood demolition of old homes and construction of new is a part of the streetscape.

Both our children can pick the sound of an excavator munching into a house from blocks away. Skip bins seem to decorate every street. 

 

We are neither demolishing nor building, but we try to do our small bit to put at least some construction waste to better use. 

One recent project was the guinea pig cage - aka The Piggie Palace. 

 

The Piggie Palace is made largely from old floorboards, salvaged (by a friend) from a house under demolition.

Timber from the bin in front of the construction site two doors up has partly been stockpiled, and partly used to construct shelves and bench in Tyson's teeny shed. 

Meanwhile I used bricks salavaged from the same site to make a new sandpit. 

 

After setting my team to work emptying out the patch of garden that had become known as 'the digging hole', I gave it brick walls. 

Tyson later added a black plastic lining to the bottom and new clean sand completed the transformation.

Initial Time: Collecting and storing waste materials took varying amounts of time, from about twenty minutes to collect and stack some bricks to a half day expedition to retrieve and store salvaged floorboards and other timber from the shed of a friend who was moving into a smaller place. Using salvaged materials added a little time to the Piggie Palace, as floorboards had to be ripped to the right width, but generally 'waste' takes no more time to use than new stuff.

Initial Cost: zero for waste materials; most projects have required some additional purchases (eg. sand for the sandpit, fastenings for the Piggie Palace)

  

Ongoing time or cost commitment: For these projects, zero. The ongoing commitment is to use materials we have salvaged and stored (mostly timber). Some of this timber (that which is not treated) will be burnt in our fire drum through the cooler months.

 

Impact: According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, over 40% of the waste generated in Australia is construction and demolition waste. Most of it (over 80%) is concrete and bricks. Fortunately, there are efforts to recycle construction and demolition waste. In 2003 (the most recent statistics), 57% of this waste was recycled, compared with only 46% of total waste, meaning that 'only' 34% of landfill across the country was comprised of construction and demolition waste. Here in Perth, however, things are much worse, with only 21% of this form of waste recycled, making it 57% of our landfill (approximately 1.5 million of an annual 2.7 million tonnes of landfill). And even the national figures are not great when you consider that around 75% of this waste is 'clean excavated material, concrete, bricks and timber'. In New South Wales, this 75% is largely saved from landfill. The rest of us need to lift our game. (And perhaps we are. These are quite old figures. Something from 2012 apparently says WA has upped its recycling in this sector to 30-40%).

Bricks and concrete are supposedly easy and cost-effective to recycle, by grinding down for aggregate, which is used in things like low-grade roads and non-structural sub-bases. Timber is a little more difficult, as it requires manual labour to salvage good pieces, and for economic reasons most demolitions are heavily mechanised operations.

We did make sure to ask before skiving off home with a barrow of construction materials, as these could be a valuable resource, but in each case they were destined for landfill and no-one minded our salvage operations. The bits and pieces we have reused are a miniscule portion of what is being disposed of. But perhaps if more people started eying construction or demolition site skip bins as resources rather than waste gathering receptacles we could chip into the mountains of waste we are building up for our children.

 

Links: 

Four-minute video of construction waste recycling plant in Perth. You can also book a tour of the plant. (Thanks for the link M, for some reason your comment doesn't seem to be showing up)

House in Brighton UK made entirely out of waste materials. 

An episode of 'Josh's House' that particularly looks at construction and demolition waste, including a visit to a recycling plant for this material. (The program in general is all about Josh Byrne building two sustainable homes here in Perth in 2012-2013)

ABS article on waste in Australia, recycling trends, causes and impacts, and lots of statistics (of course, because its the ABS) 

Australian government publication with lots of information and case studies on recycling and reuse of construction and demolition waste 'across the supply chain'.

WA Waste Authority: oh so many information documents about construction and demolition waste.

Sustainabilty Victoria: 'How to minimise construction and demolition waste' with linked info articles

Environmental Protection Authority NSW: 'Disposing of household building waste' with documents for the beautifully named process of 'house deconstruction'.

Keep calm and shade everything

We are setting records for hot weather again in Perth this week, so it seems a good time to share this summer's improvements to our shading.

Externally, our home is shaded by vegetation where possible, shade cloth protecting most glass areas, and an ad hoc combination including: foam mats in a window, a shed against a western wall, folded trestle table leaning against another wall and an assortment of things hanging on the clothesline. Internally, we have experimented with many ways to create an insulating layer in our windows, to keep the day's heat out. Most of these I have previously discussed here or here: towels, old painting canvas, mattress, cardboard boxes, cushions, styrofoam cooler boxes... All of these are good, but this year we are onto something I think is easier and potentially more effective: corflute board.

For those unfamiliar, corflute is a 'twin wall polypropylene sheet'. Because it has a ripple between its two surfaces it creates a layer of trapped air - exactly what you want for insulation. However, corflute allows some light through (more than, say, a mattress or cardboard box in the window), meaning the house can be not quite such a cave on hot days - although, as most of our recycled corflute came coloured black on one side, we are not benefitting quite so much from this property.

We now put corflute up inside five windows on hot days, and have installed a 'permanent' summer panel of corflute across half of the over-exposed glass sliding doors to the southwest facing laundry. The loungeroom window panels, being about two-thirds window height, leave a 'clerestory' window space, shaded by the small eaves, which allows a bright naturally-lit room.

Initial Time: There was no set-up time besides sourcing the corflute, which we did within other activities. We did make a kids' art activity out of decorating the panels for the lounge window, as I didn't want to live with the brand names from their previous life, but that was optional and fun.  

Initial Cost: Zero. We picked up our first panel of corflute at REmida, the wonderful centre in West Perth that recycles industrial discards for use by schools, community groups, artists and individuals. The rest came via Tyson's dad, a retired engineer, who had a bunch lying around from disused signage picked up on construction sites. If you have to buy them, corflute panels roughly this size cost about $4-$5 each.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Every day, a few minutes at each end of the day to put the shades up and take them down. 

Impact: A southwest facing vertical surface in Perth in summer receives approximately 3kWh of energy per square metre per day. Its best to shade on the outside, so the heat doesn't get in at all, but providing an insulating layer inside windows slows the rate that heat energy gets into the room, and reflects quite a lot of it back through the glass. Once the heat is inside your house, you have to either live with it or remove it. The latter requires electricity, and lots of it.

As I write, well after dark, it is hot and still, the end of our fourth consecutive day over 40°C (104°F). We've equalled the record for days-over-forty (set in 1933) and if it hits 40°C again tomorrow we will have a new record. Perth is a funny place - although we are all wilting, there is also a slightly defiant 'bring it on' mentality. We wouldn't mind one more extreme day if it meant we got to Break A Record. 

Here at our house, we are feeling pretty good about how little we have used the aircon in the past four days: so far only for three or four hours total. We've done most of the things I talked about last time we had a record hot week, in addition to all our passive cooling measures. The corflute board has been up each day and is working a treat to keep out much of the 3+kWh we've been receiving. We also replaced our big rear shadecloth at the start of summer (the eight-year-old one finally perished) and the new shade has a higher block-out rating (90%). If it wasn't for the hot nights and lack of overnight breezes to refresh the house we probably wouldn't have needed the aircon at all.

Security screens

Summer in Perth... time to talk again about passive cooling.

We have been renting this house for eight and a half years (a rental duration miracle). The balance between renters and landlords in Perth has tipped a bit in the past year. Landlords are currently keen to retain good tenants, as vacancy rates are up, so when we got a new property manager a few months back we thought it was worth asking for a few non-essential-but-desirable things around the house. Second on our short list (after 'permission to have a pet') was security screens for the four windows that did not already have them.

The new property manger was very supportive, and the owners agreed to pay for screens. They were installed at the start of January, just in time for our hottest summer months. A big thank you to both owners and agent for arranging this!

Although we could secure the windows previously, this required having them almost completely closed. In summer, a key part of our passive cooling approach is ventilating the house at night. For maximum air flow we need the windows wide open while we sleep, but in our neighbourhood that is not really an option without security screens.  

The new screens for the large lounge and kitchen windows in particular make a big difference to how much hot air we can remove from the house through the night. We are now leaving all our windows open, and, as described previously, using extractor fans and pedestal fans to assist in removing the day's heat after dark.

Initial Time: five minutes conversation with our property manager, then quite a lot of weeks of waiting.

Initial Cost: The owners have covered the cost. However, the guy installing them told us the big windows cost $160 and the narrow bathroom window was $110. I'm not sure whether this included his time to install them also (Installation took less than an hour).

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Two minutes at the end of each day to open all the windows; two minutes in the morning before the day heats up to whip around and close them all.

Impact: Our airconditioner uses approximately 1.5-2kWh (units) per hour, so it doesn't take long to gobble up plenty of energy cooling the house. Our average daily electricity usage is 6-7 units per day, so the airconditioner can double our usage in under four hours. We've had one really hot spell since the screens went in and I felt the living areas were cooler in the mornings that they had been pre-screen, meaning we lasted longer before using electricity to cool the house. My post last January about extractor fans has detailed calculations of energy use to cool overnight with our airconditioner or with fans and open windows. 

And finally (totally unrelated to passive cooling but also a result of asking the landlord for a few things): Here are the newest additions to our family, the much-loved baby guinea pigs 'Smudge' and 'Excavator'.

 

All I want for Christmas is to change the world

This month's action is to write this blog post, to ask YOU to do something.

Would you consider taking a Small Step for Sustainability this Christmas, as your gift to me, or to someone you love more than me? Perhaps especially as a gift to someone younger than yourself, who will be living longer with the world you are creating.

Or, would you consider asking your friends to take a Small Step as their gift to you, instead of buying you something? You could direct them here for ideas.

Following are over six years of our Small Steps sorted as suggestions for you to try 'gifting':

Reduce your energy usage

Get your electrical equipment off standby; wash in cold water; use more efficient lighting (note that this is an old post and there are many more options now - see comments); boil less water; turn down your hot water heater; insulate your hot water piping.

Make changes to cool your house (and yourself) passively (turn your aircon down - or even off!)

Shade your house (1 2 3 4), put up a heat barrier (curtain), use pelmets, cool with extractor fans and various other tricks.

Make changes to heat passively

Warm yourself before you heat the room; seal up drafts; various other tips. (Particularly for those of you heading for Christmas in the northern hemisphere! You have probably noticed that cooling is a bigger issue than heating for us in Perth)

Make sustainable choices in your celebrations

Christmas (1 2 3 4); Birthdays (1 2 3); catering in general (1 2); going on holiday

 

Make sustainable choices about your food

Buy from a producer (try a farmers' market); use & preserve bulk seasonal fruit and veg: strawberries 1 2, plums 1 2,  nectarines, lilly pillies, tomatoes (bottling and making purchase choices); commit to buying local for a particular item (we chose cheese - 1 2)

Support local businesses

For school supplies and fundraising (toys & books); also ideas around food, above.

Improve water use

Consider a more efficient washing machine (or at least use the one you have as efficiently as possible);  rethink how you use water; use less water in toilets (1 2); short showers instead of deep baths; catch tap water; reuse grey water (with buckets, or with a wheelie bin 1 2)

Reduce your TV use (here)

 

Make ethical consumption choices

Fundraiser chocolates; clothes; printing; use the Shop Ethical Guide; washing powder; use libraries and buy secondhand; also all the ideas already mentioned around food and local businesses.

Be more sustainable in your garden

Grow grapevines; compost; and then compost better; drip irrigate; utilise your garden waste; use grey water (see the water section above) 

Reduce your waste

Get rid of phone books; pack rubbish-free lunches; fix instead of chuck and replace; use cloth nappies and cloth nappy wipes; use bread bags instead of nappy sacks; try no-buy no-waste toddler activities;  return unwanted packaging; rescue items from bulk waste; consider rubbish when you are buying.

Reuse materials to make new things

Verge collection beds reformed into a loft bed; room redecoration using existing materials; uses for pieces from an old washing machine
 

Make choices about your transport

Get to school without a car; car pool; consider a more efficient car; buy a bike (and/or commit to using it); rig up your bike to carry stuff; climb stairs instead of taking the lift.

 

Advocate for sustainability

Have a conversation in your household; write a blog (or share or comment on this one) - or whatever way best suits you to let others know about sustainable choices your are making; join a public demonstration or lobby people in power.

Assorted other posts

Short-form list of lots of actions from before I began blogging - lots of these are the simpler actions, so possibly a good starting place if this is all new to you;  combined blog of six months of ideas; update on how we did with our first year of commitments; Introduction to the blog, the 'one thing a month' project, and us in general.

If you just arrived here this list might look a bit overwhelming, as if we are some sort of sustainability gurus living the life. We are not. I've been writing this blog for just on six years, and we've been plodding away at improving our sustainability for some time longer than that. It all began because I was finding myself overwhelmed both by the enormity of the world's problems and by Tyson's enthusiasm for conquering them, so we decided we would take on just one thing a month. That was a slow enough pace that I thought I could manage it. Small steps. 

There are now a lot of actions documented here and I am hopeful the blog can be a resource for others wanting to take small steps.

 

Initial Time: For me, the couple of hours it took to write this post. For you: if you would like something that doesn't need a lot of your time, scroll all the way to the bottom and choose the label 'under 15 minutes'.

Initial Cost: For me, zero. For you: if you would like to choose something that doesn't cost you much money, choose the label 'under $15' for ideas.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: For me, the time it takes to answer any questions that you might throw at me as you take your Small Steps. For you: depends which Small Step you choose!

Impact: I will never know how many people read this and take a Small Step. Ideally I am hoping for a double impact: less Christmas gifts purchased AND a whole pile of individual little actions all over the world adding up to a better world. It would warm my heart to hear back from you if you do something in response to reading this. Perhaps you could even send me a photo of your Small Step (I may manage a follow-up post to report back on the impact of this Christmas action)

 

And a big smoochy thank you to everyone who reads this blog regularly. I really appreciate you giving it your time. Have a lovely Christmas season.

Choose the UpCycle

What to do with all old top-loader washing machines that are no longer considered sufficiently efficient?

I've written before about upgrading to efficient washing machines but this creates a waste problem as obsolete washing machines relocate to landfill. Earlier in the year my sister bought a house that came with an old washing machine, which she replaced. Tyson has been re-using parts from that machine ever since, along with a second one he 'rescued' from the roadside on bulk rubbish.

Project one: fire drum.

This is the stainless steel drum from a top-loader washing machine removed from its casing. All those little holes keep the fire supplied with oxygen, and ensure warmth is at foot-level as well as face-level.

Tyson also rescued pieces of the electrics to use as the guts for a disc sander. That is, the spinny bits from the washing machine are now spinning a sanding disc. But it was a bit more complicated than that makes it sound - not really a straight swap.

 

He would like to add that if you are not at least a little familiar with electronics, this should not be attempted. In particular, the capacitor in an old washing machine (looks a bit like a D-cell battery) can retain enough charge to give you a nasty shock even long after the machine has been unplugged.

Some of the components of this sander, including the power switch, were amongst items salvaged from Tyson's Grampy's shed years ago, which are still being sorted through at his parents' house.

   

Smaller pieces from the washing machine were also used (along with much recycled timber) to build The Marble Run. Oh, the Marble Run... quite possibly the coolest thing in the world. Built in association with remodeling the children's bedroom without buying anything new. A photo just won't do, so here is a little video clip. See if you can spot pieces that might once have lived in a washing machine. Clue: look for metal.

 

The timber for the Marble Run was partly left over from building the loft bed (which was in turn largely made from furniture found on the verge at bulk waste time) and partly out of the skip bin for a construction site down the road.

The casing from the washing machine now stores wood for the fire drum

The power cord was reused for the sander. Tyson also salvaged a pile of screws and other bits and pieces for future use.

I believe trendy types call this 'upcycling'. But I am not trendy so to me its just using every possible piece that can be kept out of the bin. Yes, we do have a shed full of things that 'might be useful'. In fact, two weeks ago we acquired a second shed (Thank you gift-ers!)

Of course, not everything is re-usable, even with Tyson's handy-skills. The picture at the very top of this blog shows Tyson also pulling apart the old dryer that my sister removed from her house when she moved in (even new dryers are unbelievably wasteful and, in Perth, completely unnecessary, let alone really old ones). He discovered that the metal was inferior quality - flimsy sheet metal  - and most of the dryer ended up as rubbish, although a portion is in use as a shed shelf, and smaller bits and pieces were added to Tyson's stock of construction materials.

Initial Time: Pulling the first washing machine apart sufficiently to transport it home took Tyson a couple of hours. The second machine was quicker - he had learnt a few tricks by then. Building the sander took many hours snatched in bits over weeks and weeks, but (as with many of Tyson's projects) was also an activity often shared with Small Boy (and Bigger Girl, but it mostly happened when she was at school). The Marble Run keeps getting updates and alterations. The basic straight-run sections took only an hour or two, but if all the modifications were added together it has consumed a lot of hours. Ratio of fun-had-by-children to time-spent-building is still massively on the side of fun, though. So many hours of glee.

Initial Cost: zero for the fire drum; approx. $20 for a set of ten sanding discs and $25 for a velcro pad to attach them to the sander.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: sourcing firewood for the fire drum.

Impact: 

Anything we can do to reduce our waste is a good thing, as Australian households average around one tonne of household rubbish each year. When trying to explain recently to our Small Boy why we use cloth nappies and reusable nappy wipes, I slightly exaggerated by telling him every disposable nappy we threw away was being stored up to give back to him when he was a grown-up (which he pronounces 'donut'). But its only a slight exaggeration. The stuff we put in landfill will be around for our children and grandchildren to deal with into their adulthood. Would we think differently about our waste if we could see our one-tonne-per-year growing into a bigger and bigger pile, which would be ours personally to manage along with our pensions, long after we had all turned into donuts? I certainly would, and I am someone who already thinks about waste. Perhaps I have influenced my Small Boy - last time the truck came to pick up remaining bulk rubbish from the verge he wept and howled to see it all crunched away.

By re-using materials we also reduce our consumption - the opposite end of the cycle. At the consumption end the impact is around reducing the raw materials extracted from the earth to create the objects we desire, the fuel used to transport both components and completed items all over the globe, and superfluous material used in packaging all along the way. It is easy to forget both the origin and the end point for goods we consume - as if they begin life on supermarket shelves wholly created and vanish into thin air when the rubbish truck goes around the corner. 

Because of these concerns about consumption, we would never have bought ourselves a fire drum, as its not important enough to us in the scheme of things to warrant spinning the consumption wheel to acquire one (Tyson may have eventually purchased a sander, although he says probably not). A final impact, therefore, is that we are now very much enjoying items we would otherwise have foregone.

glass of wine not pictured