At our local Harvest Festival this year, all three colored waste bins were set out – compost (green), recycling (blue), and landfill (black).  Yes, landfill is the new word for garbage.  It helps the kids at the elementary level better understand where things end up, and it’s probably a good refresher for the rest of us.

Every night almost twenty 18 wheeler trucks head up to the Altamont Pass full of garbage.  At the top of a hill, they dump their loads into a valley – a valley of garbage.  The next day, the same convoy of trucks heads up there again, dumping more, again and again.  More garbage piled on top of years of garbage.  When it’s full, it will get covered with dirt and they will look for a new valley to fill with garbage.  Starting to sound like the subtext in Pixar’s Wall-e?  Unfortunately it’s reality.  And, those eighteen trucks are coming only from Alameda County – imagine that multiplied by every county in the country – thousands of valleys of garbage.

That’s why we’re calling it landfill to the young ones.  And, they are getting it.  The elementary school kids are doing an excellent job of sorting all their waste at school.  Into the green bins go their food scraps, their used paper plates and napkins, empty milk cartons and the potato based utensils that come with their hot lunch programs.  Un-soiled cardboard and paper go into the blue recycling bins along with yogurt containers and plastic bottles.  Plastic bags, and plastic tray covers get collected in a separate bin for recycling.  Very little is left for the landfill.

At the Harvest Festival, it was these same young kids that were getting it right.  They knew which plastic looking cups were made from corn or potatoes and therefore compostable in the green bins.  They knew where to put their food scraps and paper plates.

Their parents … well lets just say they are getting better.  More waste was diverted this year than last, and the volunteers by the bins did a great job of helping folks figure out what was waste and what wasn’t.  At the end of the day, there were only 2 bins full of stuff for the landfill – along with 6 full compost bins and 16 full recycling bins!

Is it easier to just throw it all in the garbage?  Yes, but try to visualize that valley up in the Altamont Pass each time you do.  Putting what you can in the green and blue bins helps bring this material back again – making something useful with your waste.  If you can’t quite comprehend the reasoning – ask a third grader – they’re here to help.

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watermelon

A few years ago I started a strict snack policy for my soccer team.  I decided I would be the coach that didn’t allow any garbage or sweets, at all, none.  My motivation was split between green and health reasons.  One the green side, I was always bothered by the amount of trash left pouring out of the fields’ garbage pails by Saturday afternoon.  And, why is it that when kids participate in an athletic event, people feel the need to give them donuts and cake right afterwards?  Isn’t the idea of athleticism to be doing healthy activities?  If kids are trained from age six to expect brownies after every sporting event, the focus of the day moves from what’s done on the field, to what’s waiting for them off the field.

So there we were, the parents were given a strict snack code: fruit only, and no garbage – no plates, no plastic silverware, no juice boxes, just fruit.  Since I required that all players bring water bottles to every game, I gave the parents the option to bring gallon sized containers of lemonade or juice to pour into the kids’ bottles if they wanted.

By the middle of the season, I was elated to see that both the parents and the kids loved it.  After every game, you should have seen these six and seven year olds wolfing down cantaloupe.  This made snack low cost, easy, and no parental pressure to bring a cooler snack than Jimmy’s Dad brought.

Last year the Piedmont Soccer Club adopted the policy as a suggestion for all soccer teams, and I keep pushing it especially for the U8 kids.  Garbage pails have been less over flowing, and kids are probably eating their lunch more, after a 10:00 game.  Imagine if your kid was at home on a Saturday, would you offer him brownies at 11:00 in the morning?

Coaches and parents, please keep this in mind – make life easier, healthier and greener for your whole team.  Just fruit, no garbage, nothing in wrappers, and definitely no disposable plastic water bottles – one tupperware with cleaned grapes, sliced watermelon, orange slices or even strawberries.  And, bring home the rinds and throw them in your green bin – put the tupperware down with the lid next to it and the kids’ will naturally discard the rinds on the lid – close it up, bring it home – nothing left at the field but sweat.

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liquidambar tree fruit

Is your front grass looking dead?  Got liquidambars?  They could be the problem.  You may want to think about doing something different than just adding more time to your sprinklers.

It’s brown right at the edge of the sidewalk.  I tried adding compost to the grass, biasing all the sprinklers to water more next to the sidewalk, even the occasional spot watering, but it was all drying up.  Then when a large limb on a friend’s tree fell out of the blue last week, I learned that on hot days, these trees try to maximize the amount of water they hold as means of conserving water.  This protection mechanism results in the tree’s limbs getting water-logged and heavy – recently many have been breaking under their own weight.  Sudden limb drop, or summer branch drop – can be alleviated with pruning.  Note to self, do not park your antique gem underneath a large limbed liquidambar on a hot day.

But what about the brown grass?  It now made sense to me: these trees are loading up on water and they’re looking for the easiest water source – my sprinklered grass.  Liquidambars are known for spreading shallow root systems, and recently I’m seeing mine suck up water from my grass much more than previous years.

I decided to give up on the front two feet of grass next to the sidewalk, and plant low water plants there.  So this weekend, I dug up the sod.  Sure enough, sitting right underneath the sod was an array of roots – a system that had stretched under the sidewalk, and permeated the underside of the lawn.  As I dug up the sod along the sidewalk, every six inches I found another inch thick root that had crept under the sidewalk, and spread out amongst the sod’s roots.

With the first two feet of grass removed, and small localized plants going in, I’ll be able to keep track of roots wandering under the sidewalk (also lifting the concrete).  This should save the rest of the grass which had been doing well with only 10-12 minutes of water twice per week.

With a little luck I’ll have greener plants with less water, a few more years of flat sidewalks, and hopefully some trees that will co-habitate with the localized plants instead of sod.

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Father changing baby's diaper

Yes, infants – they are smarter than we think.  In the days before diapers, it didn’t take three years for babies to learn where to go. If you can learn to communicate with your baby from the beginning, yes, before he/she can even sit, you’ll save yourself a lot of work, and save the environment a lot of landfill.  Try to visualize this – the average western infant will have approximately 4000-5000 diaper changes – imagine that piled up in your backyard.

Here’s how the idea works: Babies know when they need to eliminate, but during the first few months of life, we train them to ignore any goal of communication with parents, and instead to use a diaper as a toilet.  Years later we must re-train them to use a toilet, thereby unlearning what they have been trained for years.

Some would argue that it’s inconvenient to start worrying about training from the beginning, but the reality is it’s inconvenient whenever the training is started.  And, think how many changes you can avoid.  This technique has been used throughout Asia and parts of Africa for hundreds of years.

The keys to this approach are consistency and observation.  From the beginning, birth to six months, you must make note of your baby’s cues and his/her elimination routine.  Then, when you think they need to go, you bring them to a regular place and make a quiet sssss sound.  They will begin to associate the sound and take cues from you.  Many people will keep their baby bare bottomed for this technique, but it can be done with diapers, cloth or disposable.  And, it can be done part-time as long as you and/or your daycare provider is consistent with the schedule.

You’ll want to read more about this before starting, but try it – a huge time and landfill savings is waiting.

http://www.diaperfreebaby.org/
or a great simple explanation can be read here:
http://www.timl.com/ipt/

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