Materials and Waste

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Cheap And Easy Storage (Using Glass Jars)

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As much as I despise things packaged in glass, the containers are quite reusable for storing small nuts and washers in your shop, and indeed my dad does this. Great way to reuse those jars.

Toilet Paper! 🚽

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Toilet Paper! 🚽

Using toilet paper if you use an outhouse or even a Porta John makes a lot of sense – the carbon helps tie down the nitrogen so that the poop smells less and the waste breaks down into night soil quicker. Bidets aren’t practical in outhouses, they lack running water.

Not sure if it makes as much sense on indoor toilet to use toilet paper. Toilet paper is an enormous waste of paper that is rarely from recycled stock and when it’s flushed down a toilet in a municipal sewer system, it is scraped away as solids in the primary clarifier and usually trucked to a landfill, burned in an incinerator or in some cases processed into farm fertilizer as biosolids. Seems like a waste.

Toilet paper on septic systems usually ends up as solids in a septic tank that needs to pumped occasionally as a lot of it doesn’t break down that quickly. Honestly, it’s probably better to actually keep toilet paper out of the toilet on septic systems to reduce the amount of solids going into the system by keeping a waste basket next to the toilet. That’s common in many third world countries and for thrifty farm families trying to avoid pumping their septic tanks.

Earlier tonight I was looking at an advertisement for trash bags made out of “ocean bound plastic”

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Earlier tonight I was looking at an advertisement for trash bags made out of “ocean bound plastic”. The whole concept seems patently absurd — in much of world there isn’t much strategic dumping of waste plastic into the ocean. Recovery from plastics, from the ocean, seems kind of a joke too, as any resin is likely highly contaminated with dirt and debris, to say nothing of the damage to the material from salt and sunlight. All things that video I posted earlier confirms. Like so many green-marketing products these days, it’s pretty much a scam.