Recycling an entire house....

Here at Wastebusters we see the problems that are associated with building and demolition waste. According to some figures I've read, this could take up possibly 50% of landfills. Many people say that it's just too hard and way too costly to de-construct a house and separate the waste into streams.

When I was in the UK this Christmas I noticed that they are putting a lot of effort into sorting their building site waste. From what I could tell their landfills are filling up pretty quick and councils have chosen this way to reduce what goes in.

So when I read an article on TreeHugger this morning about a ladies mission to recycle and entire house I was hooked. There is a fantastic video on YouTube showing how she does it. This is very reassuring that we can indeed deal with demolition in sensible and responsible way. The flip side is that this lady claims she has even saved some money.....

Worm Farming at Queenstown Primary

I've been really lucky to do lots of work at Queenstown Primary this year. One of the topics that I've done heaps of work on has been with the middle syndicate and them learning about how to deal with organic waste. One of the things they've investigated is worm farms. Now that the weather is finally warming up it was time last week to get their worm farm up and running.

As usual the children were awesome, so enthusiastic and full of energy. To make the most of the great weather, we we all congregated outside and had a quick refresher about worms, how and what we feed them, as well as any other things we could do to make their lives happy.

We found a nice spot under a tree, close to where lunch is eaten, but, also off the beaten track a little. Perfect! Everybody had a go at shredding newspaper, remember it has a grain so will rip vertically really easily but horizontally is a bit of a disaster. After dampening it with some water it is ready to make a nice bed for the bottom of the worm far.

After adding the worms, which have been touring the classrooms over the last few weeks, we gave them some more food from today's lunch. All nicely chopped down to bite size pieces. Covered them up with some more shredded paper and then put the lid on. Simple, fun and a fantastic way to deal with the food waste from lunch times in a responsible way.

Great work Queenstown Primary!