Wasteweardaily

First I want to say that I appreciate all the comments I get on this blog.  One person said they liked the clothing and dumpster diving posts, but to please post about how I was getting to my Riot goals, like using little water. Another person said they liked the water saving posts but missed the trashion posts. Well, I will see what I can do about trying to post on both. I actually had been taking a break from dumpster diving since it fills my house with stuff and creates quite a bit of laundry. It is impossible for me to just pick out a few things that I like and to leave so much good stuff.  When I go, I always come home with a trunk full! My mother in law came to visit for two weeks and so I put the diving on hold to get the house cleaned up. Then I didn’t dive while she was here, even though she thought it was great and took home several garments. She is even planning on telling her friends exactly where they came from. She said it was half the fun. These are two tops I found in the dumpster that still had the tags on them! She loved them both.

Then in two weeks my sister in law comes, so I have to get the house cleaned up again. I may allow myself one trip this week and then no more for awhile. I really miss diving. The treasure hunting aspect of it draws me as much as getting free clothes or saving things from the landfill. As the weather heats up I find I don’t have as many shorts as I would like.  And surprisingly I have lost some weight, so that some of the shorts I got three of four months ago are not staying up so well.

I may do some scavenging and have a yard sale. We have too much stuff in our house. So we could have a successful sale I think. Have to decide if I want to go to all that trouble.

I have also been very busy in the garden. Planting, watering, weeding and some harvesting as well. I plan on doing a post on pickles, my garden, and a few more on saving water.

It is difficult thinking up really good titles for posts. If the title doesn’t explain things this will. This post is about how to irrigate your garden or water your plants without taxing one of our most precious resources.

First off I have to say that using fresh drinking quality water to water your lawn/grass is in my opinion a big waste. I am not saying you cannot have grass. We have grass in our yard. We have more grass than I would like, but it came with the house and it is hard to get rid of. We do not irrigate our lawn. It turns brown in the winter and occasionally in the spring when there is no rain, like right now. It has not rained for over two weeks where I live. So consider where you live, how much rainfall you get and what kind of ground cover is best suited to your region. Sometimes, rocks are the best ground cover.

If you just have to have a lawn that needs irrigation then the least you should do is have a grey-water system installed. All the water from your shower, bath and laundry can be diverted to a tank to water your grass. Some municipalities even offer this as an option to hook up to. If you cannot hook up to a grey-water system and you do have a sprinkler system, then use it to its fullest potential. Do not water when it is raining. Water only once a week. Test your system to see how long it takes to fill a tuna can with one inch of water. Only run the system for that long each week. Many people over water their lawns. Use less or no fertilizer and leave your grass long, say 3 inches tall to keep it lush and healthy. It retains the moisture better that way.

If you have a garden, be water wise. Know how often you need to water. Know which plants need more water. Also, water at the right time of day. Our utility prohibits watering from 10AM to 4PM. This is when the water is most likely to evaporate the fastest. Overhead sprinkling is probably the most inefficient method. A lot of the water can be lost into the dry air.  Here are some articles on watering. http://www.doityourself.com/scat/watering

Prepare your soil at the beginning of the season to hold the water longer. Mulch the surface of the beds to help retain the moisture. Using drip irrigation or soaker hoses uses up to 50% less water than overhead sprinklers. Drip irrigation can be specifically designed to water each plant as opposed to the whole garden which would include the paths. Unless your paths are a walkable ground cover, they don’t need watering. Here is a great article on using grey-water in your vegetable garden. http://www.umassgreeninfo.org/fact_sheets/plant_culture/gray_water_for_gardens.html  

The biggest take home message I got from that article is don’t water root crops or leafy greens with grey-water. Also rotate between grey and fresh. There are guidelines on how much to use and what not to put into the water to begin with.

No matter how much rainwater you get annually, I think a rain barrel is a fantastic idea. There are plenty of places to buy really expensive ones or you can make one fairly cheaply.  This site http://www.cityfarmer.org/rainbarrel72.html  has a wealth of information on rainwater collection, rain barrels and irrigation.   We have several rain barrels that we use for irrigation as well as toilet flushing. Rainwater also is excellent for washing hair and clothing since it is naturally soft.     

Above is our rainwater collection system we currently use in the garden. We have a 26′ x 12′ shed with a metal and plastic roof. The rain gutter catches the water and diverts it to the first barrel. My brilliant husband figured out that the water would automatically syphon from one barrel to the next with a piece of garden hose that reaches from the bottom of one barrel to the bottom of the next. The hoses have to be filled with water, pinched off in the middle then shoved quickly into each barrel. Takes two people. Also the barrels have to have and maintain enough water to keep the ends of the hoses covered with water, otherwise the syphon action is disrupted. We did it this way because for the short term it was easier than connecting all the barrels together and elevating them to drain one into another. The last barrel is an open garbage can for dipping my watering can into.

These are pictures of rainwater collection up near the house. My daughter is transferring water from a full container into empty ones. She has a lot of fun doing this. We try to collect as much water as we possibly can since this time of year can be very dry. You do have to watch the barrels for mosquito larvae and empty those barrels sooner or use a net to scoop them out and feed them to your fish. Covering the container can prevent the mosquito from laying her eggs in the water in the first place.

According to this study http://www.princeton.edu/~perc/Percchap6.htm done at Princeton, Students took 12.5 minute showers. If the showers were fitted with the current required 2.5 gallon/minute shower head, the water usage would be 31.25 Gallons per shower. The Princeton study was done because not all their dorm showers had low flow shower heads. Some used as much as 4.25gallons/min which for a 12.5 minute shower translates to 53.125 gallons per shower. The author of the study hoped to show how much money could be saved by switching all shower heads to low flow. Quite a bit it turns out.

At this site http://www.sustainableabq.com/water_tips.htm I copied the following:

The following is a simple bathroom tip to reduce your utility bills. Take showers instead of baths, but limit the length of the showers to five minutes. A typical bathtub requires about 30 gallons for a bath. A standard shower head will flow about 3 gallons per minute. In five minutes, this uses only 15 gallons of water.

Install a low-flow shower head with a sudsing shut-off slide valve. Many common low-flow shower heads have them. While you are sudsing and scrubbing, the sudsing shut-off valve slows the water flow to a trickle. This trickle will maintain the water temperature adjustment and eliminate a shot of very hot or cold water when you slide it open again to rinse. Using a low-flow shower head with one of these valves can cut the total water usage to under ten gallons saving thousands of gallons of water per year.

So you can see, to save water, start by showering instead of bathing in a tub. Then make sure you shower head is low flow. You can see how much your shower uses by holding a bucket under it for one minute. Use a stop watch and get a friend to help if you need to. Use a five gallon bucket and remember water is heavy. If you wrap a washcloth around the shower head you wont have to hold the bucket. Once you know what your flow rate is, you can decide if you need a new head.  As mentioned above, a shut off button is really useful in saving water. If you are buying a new head, make sure it has the shut off.

The last thing to do is take a short shower.  Get wet, turn off the water, soap up, shampoo or otherwise wash hair, turn water on, rinse, condition or vinegar rinse if needed, rinse again and you are done. Three minute shower at 2.5 gallons per minute is 7.5 gallons. Not bad.

Want to do better than that? We take bucket baths at our house. It became necessary for us to do it that way because we set up a makeshift water heater outside.

It does not connect to the house or shower. So we fill up five gallon buckets with however much water we want according to how hot it is.

It can get up to 140F. In that case I only fill to about 2 gallons and carry it in to the shower. I fill it with two  more gallons or to the right temperature. Then I use a one quart plastic container to ladle the water over my head. I find four gallons to be plenty. This is not fun to do in the winter, but then again our solar water heater does not work so well then either. Any day now we will be having our makeshift one replaced with a modern technical solar water heater which will allow us to have solar hot water to all parts of the house.

  Recently I started standing in this plastic bin to catch the water so we could recycle it as toilet flushing water.

   We use this metal bin to bathe the kids outside. They really like it. They are still young. We can use the water on landscaping after it cools.

The only other tip I could mention is about bathing frequency. In our country it is fairly typical for people to bathe 1-2 times per day. Really think about how much bathing you need to do. Can you just freshen up a bit? Do you really need to wash your hair every day? I bathe twice a week in cooler months and 2-3 times a week in hotter months. If I am just sweaty I could rinse off in a gallon of water. Think about it.

A comment I received from my last post has pushed me to write about how people waste water and how you can learn not to. Stephanie commented that she was impressed with our low water use and wanted to know how we did it. It would be a very long post to highlight all the things we do so I will break it up into segments. Clothes washing, bathing, irrigating, dish washing, toilets etc.

If you want to learn how to save water or to not waste it, take a day and look at where all the water goes. At the same time, imagine what would be different if you had to haul that water in five gallon buckets from a lake stream or river in your back yard. I think what confuses people is that it can be so difficult to comprehend how much water each activity really uses.

One of the biggest water users can be the washing machine. Top loaders can use 40-60 gallons per load. Some families wash 400 loads a year. If you wash a load a day at 40 gallons per day, that is 1200 gallons a month.  A front loader can cut the water use in half. If you cannot get a front loader then wash clothes less often. Many items of clothing do not need to be washed after one wearing. Pants, sweaters and pajamas for example. Towels can be used more than once. Rethink how often your sheets need washing. Use or wear things longer than normal to save the number of loads you need to wash.

For those who want to go beyond the norm to save water while doing laundry, see if you have the option of saving laundry water to flush toilets, water trees or other landscape plants. There is a long flexible tube at the back of your washer that discharges the water to the sewer or septic. If you pull the tube out of the pipe you can insert it into another pipe to redirect the flow. We are able to stick our tube though a window and have the water run down a pipe into a garbage can. We do not have a basement. The washer is level with the ground outside. Our front loader, when washing a full load, uses about 25-30 gallons of water. It fills our garbage can. We use a biodegradable soap and use the water to irrigate our corn and fruit trees. If I used two containers and were paying attention, I could collect the rinse water in a separate container and reuse it to wash the next load.

If you want to go even a step farther, I have heard of people who shower with the drain plugged, and then they throw the laundry in the tub to wash recycling the water. Then they haul it to the washer, spin the water off, do a rinse cycle and their done.

Our family of four, two adults and two small children, does an average of four loads a week. When I bring home clothes from the dumpster I wash them and it adds, on average, two loads per week. We are still able to only use about 16 gallons per person per day. Our goal is 10.

For today, just become aware of how much water you use on a daily basis for activities. Check back to find out how to save water bathing.

Colin Bevin AKA No Impact Man is the person I credit with turning me around from being an armchair environmentalist to one who talks the talk and walks the walk. He had a light bulb moment over a year ago and decided to see if he could live a no impact life for a year. It was a gradual transition to get there and now that his year long project is done, he is deciding what he wants to continue doing. He is also becoming more politically involved.

His post on April 10th talks about what he and his wife have done to decrease the amount of trash they create on a daily basis. I thought it would be a useful thing to pass on and a great way to introduce you to a fascinating person.

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/lv-grn-42-ways.html

Yesterday I received my rebate check from the government, woo hoo. I am going shopping! I’m sending my kids to Disney for the day with my parents and I’m going to hit ALL the outlet stores in Orlando. Maybe we will rent a Hummer for the day to drive down there. Thanks for the cash George! I want to do my part for the economy. Spend, spend, spend! We don’t want a recession or even a depression. But what are we trying for? A procession? An excession? Oh who cares, lets buy shoes.

I’m still sick and still going through disposable tissues like crazy. My head is full of gunk and I just can’t do an interesting post right now. Please stay tuned

When I realized how much clothing came out of my favorite dumpster, I realized I could outfit myself without ever having to buy clothes again! Well, I had some clothes already, and brand new clothes keep finding their way to my closet one way or another. Then there is always the pull to *just see* what the thrift store has…..and more stuff comes home. I bet most people have way more clothes than they need. A few people cycle through clothing regularly, giving away an item as they buy a new one, but always keeping a small wardrobe that fits easily in their closet. This is not me though. I don’t want to be part of the problem. The problem being too much stuff.  Too much stuff for sale, too much stuff in our houses, and too much stuff in the landfill.

Oh, doesn’t that just sound pleasant! Well technically that is what I will be wearing. I was on hiatus from dumpster diving, per my husband’s wishes, for over a year while we moved across town and set up our new household. Recently I returned to my old dive and was again struck by how much is still thrown away. My plan,which has been hatching for a couple weeks, is to slowly transition to a 100% cast-off, reject, garbage wardrobe by Feb 1st. Wow, not sure if I can be 100% by then, but that is my goal.

Today, I started packing away all my normally acquired clothing. Boy is there a lot of it. I did take the opportunity to scale down, but was not very successful. As I packed and sorted items I realized  that my clothes are a huge mix of dumpster finds, thrift store purchases, gifts and a few newly purchased items. The problem being that I cannot remember what came from the dumpster and what did not. So, what I have come up with is to keep the things I think fit my criteria until they can be replaced by items that I know can.

Of course there have to be exceptions. Yes, there do! My exceptions are underwear, bras, socks and shoes. I really don’t have objections to wearing used bras, socks and shoes, but I will not be able to find enough of them-from experience. Most of my shoes are used, but I will be buying brand new-yes, you heard me-brand new walking shoes when my current ones wear out. Let’s just leave it at foot pain.

The title of my blog-Waste Wear Daily, is a spoof on the fashion digest Woman’s Wear Daily. Since I will be wearing waste(uh that’s garbage- not other gross stuff) daily, that is how the name came about. (Thanks again Christine:). Expect photos of my outfits soon. Now don’t expect any high fashion, I’m just a plain girl! But I bet you’ll be surprised anyway.