How one nappy can create positive change

It started with a folded pile of fluffy, white nappies. We remembered our mothers folding them for our siblings, back when disposables were new technology but not normalised yet. We considered the cost and the rubbish pile that would result from all the disposable nappies our baby would need, compared to our pile of fluffy white fabric squares. 

The parenting books warned us not to be martyrs about washing nappies, that we had bigger things to worry about and that the environmental harm probably wasn’t that big anyway. We researched and de-bunked this pretty quickly. New mums at the mothers group raised eyebrows. The health nurse worried that it’d be too much work. We set aside the free sample disposable nappy the hospital sent us home with and did what felt right. We hung those cloth nappies on the washing line, in the sunshine, all beaming and fresh, and knew we were on the right track.

 

One day, a work colleague handed us a big bag of baby clothes for our growing babe. Amongst the hand knits and grow suits was a nappy cover. I googled the name on the label and discovered the world of modern cloth nappies. Next came the parenting forums - such a great support in those isolated early-parenting days. Before long, we’d found a circle of supportive families who shared clothes, nappies, cups of tea and stories of other ways of doing things. Friends who also researched and questioned things, acknowledged (and sometimes rejected) what had become normalised in the industrial shift away from ecological processes. We felt encouraged to look into the home-birth and water birth we’d felt discouraged from last time. And so our next two babies were born at home, in water. Then we decided the industrial education model wasn’t right for our kids, and we embraced unschooling.

We realise now that we’d begun a lifelong process of research, analysis, taking responsibility for ourselves and doing what feels right for our children and the planet they’re going to inherit. We studied permaculture and realised we’d been implementing the permaculture principles in our home for some time. From there, waste-free living was a no-brainer. It felt straight forward and simple. To this day, we can’t imagine why it took us so long to arrive at living waste-free, but we’re glad we did as we can see that reducing our waste encapsulates climate solutions. Waste is an indicator of the work to do on climate.

Now, making choices that challenge norms seems much less daunting. We’ve avoided the waste of tens of thousands of disposable nappies. We’ve diverted tonnes of waste from landfill, avoided recycling waste, dispensed with education waste and transport emissions (all those trips commuting to kinder became long mornings at home and walks around the neighbourhood). We’ve converted our suburban lawn-filled backyard to food growing plants, and we’ve made ripples beyond our own home, encouraging others to make choices for positive impact. We’ve also normalised this way of thinking and feeling, and the practices that come with it, for our kids. 

Sometimes that one simple choice you make is just the beginning. It’s where you learn the value of following your own head and heart; exercising your decision-making muscle. It might seem benign, but it just might change the direction of your life, and your impact on the planet, for the better. Then the next time a choice presents itself, to do what’s right for the planet and the people you love, you can dive right in. 

With our own simple beginnings in mind, we’ve decided to join our friend Erin, The Rogue Ginger, in requesting our council introduce a rebate on cloth nappies and reusable menstrual products, for local residents. This has the potential to reduce at least 4% of landfill waste generated in our municipality, and clean up kerbside recycling streams. Once food and organic waste composting is implemented later this year, that percentage will rise. A rebate will mean babies born in our area won’t leave a legacy of waste, contaminating the soil where they live, for generations. It’ll also be much more affordable for more people to access reusable options, which will save the council and residents money in the longer term.  It’ll mean a clean, fresh start for all of us. Who can tell the positive ripples of change that will happen beyond that.

As for that pile of nappies of ours, we can report that 18 years later, they’re still in circulation, dusting and cleaning up spills, mopping the floor, cleaning up muddy puppy paws. As each cloth gradually wears out, we place it in the compost, or as sheet mulch in the garden and it finds a new use as worm food, enriching our soil and leaving a positive impact in more ways than one.

Ode to a worm farm :: How to make a pet poo worm farm

If there’s something we didn’t expect pet ownership would make us grateful for, it’s poo. Growing up, there was always lots of it - dog poo, cat poo, picked up before school, tied up in two plastic shopping bins, and flung into the bin for rubbish day. It was taken away so we didn’t need to think about it, or smell it anymore. When we both moved out of home and adopted pets, we continued the same daily tradition of double-bagged poo-flinging, into the stinky bin, and away. 

But then we started living waste-free, and we stopped shopping at supermarkets, so there were no smelly bins, no plastic bags, and no more away. So along came our worm farm, and the piles of poo (just poo), and the re-used brown paper bags we use to pick the poo up on dog walks, land in there. Our worm friends turn all those stinky piles into incredible compost - black gold for our fruit trees. There’s absolutely no smell. And very minimal need for us to do anything other than dig out the amazing compost, tickling the worms out of it as we go, once a year or so. 

This is what’s normal for our kids now. A life where everything is a valuable resource, and we take responsibility for what happens to it, right here, where we are. A life where we’re all part of an interconnected system, even our pets (both dogs and worms). And that’s a lesson that will last our kids their whole lives. 

How to set up a pet poo worm farm*

It is possible to use the waste pets create as a resource in your garden. You can convert their poo to compost in a dedicated worm farm and use the compost to feed ornamental plants and fruit trees (we’d keep it away from veggies and edible herbs so as to avoid any immediate toxins). A worm farm can fit in a garden, a courtyard or on a small balcony, and when working well will produce no smell. Just luscious compost for your garden.  

WHAT YOU’LL NEED:

• A container to keep your worms in. Some ideas include an old bath, Styrofoam boxes, an old bin or barrel, old car tyres, a purpose-built box or a kit from your local nursery.

• A piece of mesh to cover any holes and keep the worms in. Fly screen or shade cloth are ideal.

• Some bedding material. Some ideas include mushroom compost, garden soil, coconut fibre or garden compost, or lightly dampened shredded paper (this is ideal if you’re planning on composting pet poo).

• Worm food. For composting pet poo, don’t feed them other food along with the poo as they’ll just eat the food and ignore the poo (who wouldn’t!). If you want a regular worm farm for your veggie scraps instead of poo, make sure to stay away from citrus and onions. Worms love soft food scraps, hair clippings, crushed egg shells, vacuum cleaner dust, coffee grounds, tea bags, sawdust, soaked cardboard and shredded paper.

• Worms! You’ll need about 1000 worms specifically bred for farming. Look for tiger worms or red or blue wrigglers. Common garden worms are great for soil improvement, but not so effective in a worm farm.

STEP 1

If you’re creating a layered box system to collect worm tea, you’ll need something watertight for your bottom layer. In a bath, you might choose to place a bucket under the drain hole. If you’re using a Styrofoam box, place a watertight one on the bottom. Grab the box or container where your worms will be housed and make sure there are holes in the bottom for drainage. Place it on your watertight, tea-collecting bottom layer, if you have one.

STEP 2

Place mesh over the holes. If you’re using a bath, cover the plughole.

STEP 3

Place your worm bedding material in the box or container.

STEP 4

Add your worms to the middle of the box. If you’re using a bath, place them at one end.

STEP 5

Add some poo for the worms to eat. Use your worm farm when you’re cleaning up your kitty-litter tray or dog poo, in conjunction with carbon matter like shredded paper or recycled paper kitty litter. We collect dog poo in re-used paper bags when we take the dogs for a walk, and this feeds the worms well. Try and keep a good balance between the carbon and nitrogen based matter in your worm farm, as you'd do when making compost. If you’re using a bath, just feed the worms up the end where the worms were placed.

STEP 6

Make sure not to overfeed your worms. Start with a small amount of food and watch to see how quickly they can break it down. Keep an eye on them as you add more.

 

STEP 7

Don’t feed pet poo to your worms if you’ve recently wormed your pets – worming medication may kill your worm farm! Technically the medication should be benign when it leaves your dog, but if you want to be sure, leave it for a few days before adding it to your worm farm. 

STEP 8

Place a doubled-up sheet of dampened newspaper on top of your worm farm to retain moisture and keep your worms comfy. Then pop a cover on your worm farm – a layer of hessian, or the lid your kit came with will work.

STEP 9

In a few weeks you’ll be able to collect worm tea to feed your garden! Stick to ornamentals and fruit trees if your worms are eating pet poo.

STEP 10

As your worm farm fills up, you’ll be able to place another box or layer on top and fill it with bedding and food for your worms to migrate to. If you’re using a bath, start feeding the worms at the other end of the bath and they’ll move along to their new feeding place.

STEP 11

Harvest the beautifully broken-down compost from the previous nesting/feeding box and use it on the garden. If you have cats, you might like to bury it under some soil and mulch to keep native wildlife safe, while making valuable nutrients available to your plants and out of landfill or waterways. Happy farming!

*This is an excerpt from our book 'A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living', published in 2019 by Plum. You'll still find it at most good bookshops and libraries, or signed copies in our shop. 

Sustainably Challenged :: Waste Free

Last week we posted about the Sustainability Challenge we're taking part in. After a week full of reflection and research, this past (almost) two weeks, we've gone head on towards living a somewhat different life. The biggest challenge we set ourselves was to live waste free and although it has made us think LOTS, it hasn't been as difficult as we expected. And there have been some pretty awesome discoveries along the way.

What zero waste means to us

There are a few definitions out there of what zero waste means. For us, it means bringing nothing into our home that we can't consume, compost or repurpose. It means not contributing to landfill, or to giant floating islands of plastic. It means little to no recycling and refusing biodegradable plastics too.

Recycling can mean a portion of our waste is moved to local depots where it is sorted, often added back to landfill, or moved on and sold to companies who purchase and re-purpose it as a raw product. For plastics, this means a downgrade. So a milk bottle doesn't become a new milk bottle, it becomes something else and eventually ends up in our system as a single-use plastic item. That's a whole lot of plastic for the earth to digest. Biodegradable means the plastic breaks up into tiny particles, still floating around, polluting our water and soils.

So for us, this challenge means not being complacent about where our waste and recycling goes. It means thinking. Lots of thinking. And refusing what we can't put to good use. We want to take responsibility for everything we bring into our home.

But rather than focusing on the zero in the whole equation, the refusal, we're choosing to focus on what we can use, and how. Instead of asking is it landfill, or is it waste, we're asking "Is it compostable?" Earth is losing soil at a rapid rate, so anything we can do to help build it up is hugely valuable. Making choices that help us build up the soil in this little patch of land we're care-taking is important. And we've only scratched the surface.

Living without waste.

There are loads of simple choices everyone knows about, that we're making everyday. We're trying a little harder to remember them. Here's what we're doing:

Always carrying water bottles,
Remembering the shopping bags, stashing extras in our bags, pockets and car, just in case.
Shopping at bulk foods stores and taking our jars along.
Using lightweight cloth bags for produce.
Avoiding produce with stickers
Taking containers along to a butcher/fishmonger to place meat, poultry or fish in.

If we're caught short, paper bags are acceptable for us - we can compost them or use them for heat.
When eating out, taking our own chopsticks along and finding take away food available in paper or compostable packaging and bringing it home to compost.
Making our own toothpaste and cleaning products.
Using compostable, wooden toothbrushes and cleaning brushes.
Using cloth everything. From hankies, to family cloth (although guests have an ethical, recycled flushable toilet paper option!).
Knitting our own kitchen cloths. This one is made from an old t-shirt.
Composting everything we sweep up or vacuum. Compost heaps don't mind dust.
Remembering to compost the dog and cat poo in the special pet waste worm farm, rather than throw it out in a plastic bag into landfill - yuck!

Making our own pet food.
Making our own tea.
Getting our ferments happening again.
Getting our yoghurt and cheese making act together.
Using and making home made seaweed tea for the garden.
Learning more about the plants we grow and expanding our medicinal herb garden.
Re-evaluating the processes in our business.
Gardening more.
Sleeping better.

Things we've found challenging

Produce without stickers is hard to find! This is why growing our own is important.

Dairy is almost always packaged in plastic, foil, or coated cardboard. We're having to compromise by bringing home only what we can repurpose. We're allowing ourselves a maximum of 3L of fresh milk each week and repurposing the packaging to make things we can use in our garden, like seedling containers and plant tags. We have powdered organic milk as back-up too. Our dairy consumption has dropped dramatically, which is a good thing environmentally too as it takes about 1000L of water to make 1L of milk. When our beloved Elgaar dairy is back up and running in a few months, we'll be happily drinking ethically produced milk and using reusable glass instead.

Shop assistants may try to help, but not quite understand what we're doing here. Like the butcher who was happy to sell us a plastic-free chicken - once he'd removed it from the bag. Or the cheese seller who we suspect may have just removed the glad wrap, rather than cutting a fresh slice of parmesan for us. You need to be on the ball when shopping.

In Tasmania, we don't really have a one-stop shop where we can buy everything under one roof. We're travelling to the whole foods shop, the butcher, the farmer's market… We're using the car a little more and being conscious of fitting more into each car trip. We need to look into whether bike or bus travel are viable options for our whole family. At the moment, for a family of five, the car is coming out on top as the best use of energy, money and time.

Shopping in small whole foods shops with multiple children is challenging! We tend to all pile up on each other and cause traffic jams by the quinoa. We're thinking of frequenting a smaller shop with a garden where we can park the owlets for a moment while we shop. We're getting better each time we do it.

Carrying all the jars is pretty heavy and requires preparation. But once you've done it a few times, it gets easier.

Medicines, vitamins, bandaids, hardware, gardening products, postage products… even sustainable products like compostable tableware… are all wrapped in plastic. Even the food that we've bought at the whole foods shop has most likely been wrapped in plastic at some point. Our lives are so tangled up in it. So, we work harder to consume a diet that doesn't require supplementing or medicating. We take our own tableware along. We make our own and we find the very best alternatives we can, when we can. If we can't we're going to ask businesses to think about their practices and re-examine just as we are doing. Plastics and packaging create convenience that keeps a whole lot of industries in business, so  we can keep them accountable by asking them to change their practices, choosing alternatives or creating our own.

What are the benefits?

Traveling and frequenting different shops means we're engaging with our community a bit more. We're having conversations with real people and finding out more about where our food comes from. Which is a definite win.

We're more mindful of what comes into our home. There's no waste to deal with. We're saving time and life's getting simpler. Its feeding into other areas of our lives where we're thinking more minimally.

When we unpack the shopping, it's already in the jars we intend to keep it in for freshness, so we just pop it straight in the cupboard, fridge or on the bench. It saves time! Plus jars are kind of lovely food storage.

Food tends to be healthier. Even though we cooked mostly from scratch before and our diets haven't changed hugely, I'd say the way we value our food has changed and we're definitely focussed on the good stuff.

Shopping is more enjoyable. It's quicker. There are fewer choices and fewer decisions to make. There is no advertising or excess packaging to deal with. Once you've got it sussed, it saves you lots of time and it's generally more pleasant.

We thought shopping this way would be more expensive. We're still trying to tally all the exact sums on that, but so far it's not! We have managed to stick to budget and feed ourselves well. We've found there's actually savings to be made on certain items we've always bought. And we're not paying for packaging which makes up part of the cost of most pre-packaged foods. Awesome.

Our soils are improving! By focussing on what we can compost, we're staying mindful of things that feed and nourish the soils that nourish the plants that nourish us. Which may lead us to the final frontier of waste one day… humanure. Possibly the only way we can really, truly live waste free. Baby steps though, right? ;)

Where to from here? 

Well, before we began this challenge, we put all the items that came in non-refillable containers into lockdown. We were fortunate that it began at the end of a pay cycle, so the fridge and cupboards were absolutely empty, so much of our waste had already left the building. Things like shampoo bottles and tea bag packets remained unfinished. Things we could replace with a more ethical, compostable version. Now we've replaced them, and know it's easy enough to live without them, we'll phase them out completely.

So we'll be filling our rubbish and recycling bins one more time. We may even hire a small skip for some bits and pieces we really can't repurpose, sell or give away. Decisions we made earlier that we wouldn't make again now. And we'll be letting them go, learning and moving on. Now we know our version of zero-waste is totally achievable, and actually not as huge a leap as we first thought, we'll be continuing along this path from now on.

We'll be making changes to Spiral Garden, which remove the need for our customers to worry about this stuff, as much as we can. We'll be thinking about how Christmas and birthdays might look for our family over the next few months. We'll be composting and gardening and thinking about some of the other things we might change too, staying positive that every tiny change we make is a step in the right direction for our planet. It's all a bit of an adventure!

Here are some extra links you may like to look at: 
Zero Waste Home
Trash is for Tossers
The Story of Stuff
Put Down the Plastic

Have you ever given much thought to waste, or a zero-waste lifestyle? If you have any questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Have a gorgeous week, whatever adventures you're on! 

UPDATE! We've learnt so much more in our zero waste adventures since this post was written and we've decided to share lots of that information in a supportive and fun space in our new e-course at zerowastefamilies.com! Join us for four weeks as we help you move towards zero waste living. 

~Lauren. xx