The fact that it's the consumer's responsibility to sort their waste and to try and minimise its impact on the environment in the first place is completely wrong to me.

Most people in urban areas rely on stores for basic survival, and the vast majority of products we buy there come with unnecessary waste. It doesn't make any sense to then tell these people "by the way, you'd better clean up that mess when you're done because it's bad for the environment". If governments were truly concerned or willing to act, this waste wouldn't make it into our homes in the first place.

If a company wants to sell a product, they should be held accountable for the waste that comes along with it. They should have to prove that they can reuse the waste and be incentivised to reduce it. If they can't, they can't operate.

Ecocide laws need to become commonplace, and the consumer should not be responsible for their waste if they haven't got legitimate alternative options. I understand this community is more willing to do their part in this regard, but I don't think it'll ever be feasible to expect this from the wider population. We need to stem the flow, not just handle the mess.

'Disposables' isn't a perfect term, but essentially I refer to things such as underwear, toilet paper, tissues, and other such things that tend to have a lifespan of either one use, or one person.

I am fortunate enough to have been insulated by the possession of many things from youth, but as the years go by things begin wearing out or needing replacement, and eventually that safety net will fade, so I would like to ask from the zerowaste community, what is your approach to common things that are typically used to short lifecycles?

First off, homemade napalm is in no way illegal, nor does it explode. You've watched too many Vietnam movies. What it does do is burn. Forever. More on campfires to come.

Put a couple of fingers of unleaded in a pickle (wide mouthed) jar, stuff waste Styrofoam in it. You can jam the contents of a 40" TV packaging in a quart jar.

That's it, that easy. Keep cramming the foam in until you get a taffy consistency. Too much and it's too hard to dig out with a stick. Too little and it slips off your stick.

I keep a jar at my campsite and one in the house for starting our little fire pit. A golf ball chunk will start soaking wet kindling.

PRO TIP: Spread the goo on a cookie pan, 1.4" thick, let it dry in the summer sun, cut into little pieces with scissors, put it in a little plastic box (that you had saved already, right?). Now you can pack it out with no mess, no smell!

Never goes bad, as far as I know, can't be too dry.

Here's my original post on Feddit.org, a german instance: https://photon.slrpnk.net/post/17757233

I still made quite some effort to translate it manually for you.

I bought two phalaenopsis orchids about two months ago.

A pink, and a gold one.

First the pink one. I got it from a discounter, and... well it already looked like shit when I bought it. The roots were pretty much all dead.

Now, it recovered, and even put out its' first flower spike!

It still looks a bit dehydrated/ leathery, but otherwise it's in a stable condition and recovers very well.

The other one is from a proper garden center, AND IT LOOKED EVEN WORSE!

Not only were the roots completely mush, but it also had a new buddy in its sleeve, I call him "worm buddy", my new pet.

Now, it looks like this:

It grew new flower pods and already started to bloom! How awesome is that?

On top of that, I showed the pictures a worker in the shop I bought it, and they were so embarrassed, that they gave me a voucher for a new plant, because they called it "inrecoverable". So I got this Oncidium orchid additionally for free:

This post is just a small reminder that plants can be very tolerant to anything, and with some luck and experience, you can save them.

Curious if this would have any noticeable energy savings. Basically thinking of taking old semi-disposable plastic containers (the ones that like deli meat, butter, etc come in), freezing them outdoors, and letting them defrost (absorb heat) in the fridge/freezer. Basically back to the "ice box" model.

Anybody doing that and/or have any results to share? Mostly curious if it would be worth the effort.

I'm in the process of setting up an e-waste bin in my community, but it is separate from the general e-trash bin. I want the sign on it to request specific things that can be useful and repurposed without an insane amount of effort.

I'm looking for additional ideas to put on the list. Here's what I have so far:

-SSDs and HDDs both internal and external

-Laptops, phones, computers

-WIFI cards

-RAM sticks

-Chargers that are still working

Up until a few days ago, I've had a Google Pixel 5.

I used it for about 3-4 years, but I had to replace it due to its' hardware failing and it hitting EOL software support wise. Especially the USB-C port is damaged, and the battery is drained in just one blink of an eye.

Said device is now lying around in the drawer, and I want to find a good use out of it. It's still a fine phone. Like all those phones other people have in their drawer. It's probably faster than my homeserver, has cameras, sensors, wireless connections, and much more.

It has GrapheneOS installed, and is still more or less secure, probably even more than 80% of other android phones right now I guess?

**Do you have any ideas for what I can repurpose it? **

I know that there's Octo4a, which can turn it into an Octoprint server for my 3D-printer, but I already have a Raspberry Pi for that, and as said, the phone has an unstable USB connection.

Maybe I could use it for my photography equipment, e.g. as remote shutter?

We meet every month or two to sew the bags out of donated fabric, and give them out at a local farmers’ market

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16336190

A small project to help out anyone trying to keep their old devices functional.

I wrote a script to scrape pages of some popular alternative OS projects (such as postmarketOS and LineageOS), and put them into a single list. I'll try to automate and keep this up-to-date. Any additional OS suggestions and comments are welcome!

Something I've been working on recently is collecting old and unused laptops from various people I know. Sometimes they're shitty Chromebooks that can barely be used but sometimes they're still perfectly good and recent laptops and people just got bored of them and decided to upgrade for whatever reason. I then put Linux on these laptops (even the shitty chromebooks) and distribute them to people at my college who need one.

With the date that Microsoft is stopping support for windows 10 approaching quickly, now's a great time to prevent e-waste by upgrading to Linux or collecting people's previous laptops as they upgrade. You can also get distributions that run better than windows on low-end hardware. Even if you don't know someone who needs a laptop, you can always do something like host a Minecraft server to make use of it.

Also, you can do this to phones too. There are plenty of custom ROMs you can load on Android phones to squeeze more life out of them. Let me know if you want recommendations.

Anyway, I hope that this can inspire more people to try and repurpose electronics to prevent them from becoming e-waste.

I hate Christmas trees with passion.

Imagine growing a seedling for many years in a monoculture, just for it to get cut down and used as a dumb decoration.

And it even isn't the "cool" type of dumb decoration. You buy it, you get stung all the time while transporting it, you'll have needles lying around all over your apartment, it's a fire hazard, and after not even a few days or weeks you'll have to throw it out, which is also super annoying too.

Even worse are those ridiculous plastic Christmas trees. Don't even get me started on these ones!

Solution

Get a (big) houseplant instead!

There are many options for you out there.

You can hang your ornamentals on them and enjoy your own "Christmas tree" all year around without any guilt.

Even better, you even aren't bound to any season. For example, why not hang easter eggs on there in the spring?

Ideas

If you don't have pets, a Monstera might be great for you.

Those are very common and super easy to propagate via cuttings. Just ask your friends or neighbours if you can get one for free :)

Indoor trees, like lemon or avocado trees for example, are a great option if you don't want to spend a single cent and grow them from seed, which is what I'm doing at the moment.

You can also decorate smaller plants, like a Pothos for example.

Decorating your own bonsai would also be an eyecatcher ;)

There are literally endless options out there for you to explore!

My mom was complaining that the city has limits on how many leaves that they'll pick up, and she's got bags and bags of leaves stuffed into black garbage bags. This seems like a problem that should have some kind of backyard solution.

I've done a cursory search, and see that leaves are very compostable. They can also apparently be turned into "mold", though I don't fully understand what this means.

But I also see that there is a lot of variety in compost bins, and they're quite expensive. So I'm wondering: what's the best strategy for making leaves go away? She's not specifically interested in the product of the leaves, she just wants to find somewhere to put them after she rakes them up. Any ideas?

This is the story of how potential textile waste is intercepted, transformed and given a second life at the Material Research & Development (MRD) Facility of The Or Foundation. Speakers, hangers and laptop stands are a few of the products our talented MRD team is able to create from clothing waste coming out of Kantamanto (the world’s largest secondhand market) that would have ended up in landfills and water bodies.

Too much of the secondhand clothes that are exported to Kantamanto every week ends up as unusable waste that needs to be discarded. As we work to address these problems from source (the Global North), we are also exploring ways to bring down the quantity of waste that ends up polluting our environment. The work of transforming these materials into fibreboards and subsequently into speakers and more is one of the many alternative approaches we have.

With these products we are proving that cleaning up fashion's waste crisis can be creative, colorful and fulfilling with the potential to generate hundreds of jobs making products from materials that are responsibly and thoughtfully crafted.

This may be a stupid idea, but to my knowledge metals is are some of the best materials when it comes to being easily recyclable.

Ignoring the cost and reusability, wouldn't recyclable disposable cups made of metal be a better deal than the largely incinerated plastic cups?

I wasn't sure the best community on slrpnk to post this; but this one seemed pretty applicable.

We recently switched to using a Linux Mint laptop with an adblocker for our streaming (while also cancelling a bunch of services). A friend at the recycling center set it aside for me - the screen was irreparably smashed but it was otherwise quite a nice little laptop. Replacement screens were too expensive so I carefully removed the broken one entirely so it'd default to the HDMI port and then set it up as a quick media center (we watch a lot of YouTube and the ads were driving me crazy, I might switch to a more purpose-built OS eventually). The TV is one I pulled from an ewaste bin to replace my previous ewaste TV after it finally gave up. It has a thin line through one edge of the screen occasionally but is otherwise fine. I also recently found a perfectly good wireless trackball mouse and a Bluetooth keyboard in the same bin where I got the TV (came with that other mouse). The bin even supplied HDMI cables. The whole thing is perched on a particle board TV stand I found like a decade ago when the college kids move out.

Hey all,

In my recent post about popcorn kernels, I had a comment suggest that I could also just put the leftover kernels or stale popcorn to use for compost.

This has been something I've been thinking of for a while now. Guilty as charged, I've let good food spoil in my fridge while I've been figuring out what to do with it. While this has been getting better as I've been learning more vegan substitutions as I'm new to being vegan, as well as home cooking in general, I don't want to throw my food waste in with the garbage as I have been doing for eons now when situations arise where something spoils on me.

My issue is that, while I was taught how composting works in school, they only ever taught us how to do so if we lived in a detached home that had a backyard. I have always lived in apartment buildings, and currently am living on a second floor apartment unit. While my city does allow for people to separate food waste from other garbage and recycling, and even encourages it, my current building does not have a designated area for food waste.

What options are available to me when it comes to disposing of food waste so that in the end, my waste isn't quite "waste"? I should also likely add that I live in an area with a colder climate where winter (which is coming up soon here) often hits -30 C.

Thanks in advance!

Hey all,

Been wanting to reduce the amount of waste I generate, and one small way I was thinking of doing so was perhaps by reheating the unpopped popcorn kernels that appear in the bottom of my bowl after making a batch with my air popper.

Would this be safe to do, or is it recommended against? I'd love to reuse them if possible and ensure I have no unneeded waste there, but I also want to make sure I'm not making myself sick by eating something I shouldn't be.

Thanks in advance!

I’ve been stock-piling electronics that either people throw away, or things I bought 2nd-hand only to find they are broken.

Looks like the right to repair law is in very slow motion. Not yet enacted be the European Commission. And once it is, member states have like 2 years to actually enact it in their law. Probably even more time before consumers begin to see results.

(edit) I think some US states were the first to enact right to repair laws. So some consumers could perhaps pretend to be from one of those states to demand things like service manuals. But parts and repair is likely more out of reach ATM.

The avg. age of a car bought in Africa at the time of purchase is 21 years old. All these people buying EVs think they are taking a gas-burner off the road. But in fact cars do not get thrown away. They get shipped to Africa where they live on and continue to emit GHG for decades longer.

So what’s the answer? Destroying the car is a non-starter, as no one would throw away value. It would be like asking people to set some of their cash on fire.

Why not remove the engine and repurpose it as a backup power generator for power outtages? Then convert the rest of the car into an EV.

Conversions are being done. There are some companies offering to do the work. But these are very small scale operations that are rarely spoken of. I have to wonder why (what seems like) the best solution is being overlooked.

In the past few years I have salvaged 4 LCD screens from curbs. All of them function without defect. I have no idea why people are tossing them out. One of the 4 was perhaps tossed due to size (it was about the size of a laptop screen). But the other 3 are a decent size. Most of them even have DVI connectors. I think one of the three only has a VGA connector, so perhaps the owner did not know that could be adapted.

If you notice a dumped LCD, grab it. Don’t assume it’s broken.

I also often see flat screen TVs being dumped. They are too big to easily carry on my bicycle so I’ve not made the effort to collect them and test them. Has anyone? I just wonder if I should make the effort. Why are people tossing them? Is it because ”smart” (read: cloud dependent) TVs are becoming obsolete and owners are not smart enough to use the HDMI inputs? Or is it more commonly a case of broken hardware?

(update)
Saw ~4 or so big flat TVs in the “proper” city e-waste collection. The city provides a pallet with walls (a big box) where people dump their electronics. Then the city goes through it and gives anything that works to 2nd-hand shops. They also try to repair some things. In principle, it’s a good idea to have a process like this. But I’m somewhat gutted by this:

• no one labels the waste as working or not
• the designated middleman who sorts through it does not bother testing most things.. e.g. printers are categorically destroyed.
• the public gets no access to the waste in the step between salvage and dump (I need a spare part for a particular device and have no hope of getting it)
• the stuff is just dumped unprotected in this big box. So other appliances get tossed on top LCDs and edges of those things damage screens in transport

It’s illegal to dump e-waste on the street or in landfills in my area. They must follow the above process because persnickety neighborhood cleanliness people have pressured the gov to enforced the ban on curbside dumping. But curbside dumping is actually more environmentally sound because locals have a chance to grab something in a less damage-prone way.