George, our mailman came to my door the other day, all smiles, and said “I’ve got worms!”, to which I replied that there were several good doctors that could help him. “No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a worm composter!”
I had been showing off the garden and my compost piles to George a few weeks ago, and he excited with the idea of recycling his kitchen waste but lives in an apartment. Worm composters are the perfect solution.
Taking up little space, simple to start and maintain, a worm composter provides a happy place for your worms, who in turn will process 5 to 10 pounds of fruit and vegetable peels, pulverized egg shells, tea bags and coffee grounds every week, leaving behind worm casings, compost “tea”, and no odor.
Getting started is easy. There are several worm composting kits available that come with everything you need to create a worm ranch. A model called the Cascade Worm Factory comes complete with the bins, a manual and 10,000 worms. For the more adventurous, there is Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof, an excellent guide available in your library that will take you through constructing a worm composter out of wood, and scavenging through horse dung piles for your own red wigglers, and setting up the correct environment. Most municipal recycling programs also offer courses and resources in worm composting. Check yours today, and happy ranching!
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Mulching Away
It isn’t often that I get to use the bon mot “au contraire”, but last week presented the perfect opportunity when my nosy neighbor Fred leaned over the fence and said “getting a little lazy there, leaving all of them grass clippings on the lawn.”
I stopped pushing my manual reel mower, turned, raised an eyebrow and said “au contraire, Fred” and proceeded to explain the wonders of mulch.
There are two basic techniques for mulching. The kind I was practising on my lawn is known as lazy or accidental mulching. The grass is cut, falls onto the ground and in a couple of days has begun to break down and replenish the soil. It also keeps the ground cooler by inhibiting evaporation, leaving my grass greener with less water.
The second type of mulching is directed mulching; taking straw, leaves, bark, or wood chips and spreading them around the bases of plants or on the paths of the garden specifically to deter the growth of weeds, and to provide nutrients to the plants. This takes a little more work that just leaving your clippings on the lawn, but it is a sound way of controlling weeds, and giving your plants a boost.
Mulching is also a good garden and lawn fall activity. Shredded leaves make for excellent fall and winter plant food.
By far the biggest benefit of mulching is keeping leaves and grass clippings out of the landfill. On average 10%- 20% of landfill wastes are grass clippings. So Fred, I’m not “lazy”, I’m performing a public service for the greater good. So there.
I stopped pushing my manual reel mower, turned, raised an eyebrow and said “au contraire, Fred” and proceeded to explain the wonders of mulch.
There are two basic techniques for mulching. The kind I was practising on my lawn is known as lazy or accidental mulching. The grass is cut, falls onto the ground and in a couple of days has begun to break down and replenish the soil. It also keeps the ground cooler by inhibiting evaporation, leaving my grass greener with less water.
The second type of mulching is directed mulching; taking straw, leaves, bark, or wood chips and spreading them around the bases of plants or on the paths of the garden specifically to deter the growth of weeds, and to provide nutrients to the plants. This takes a little more work that just leaving your clippings on the lawn, but it is a sound way of controlling weeds, and giving your plants a boost.
Mulching is also a good garden and lawn fall activity. Shredded leaves make for excellent fall and winter plant food.
By far the biggest benefit of mulching is keeping leaves and grass clippings out of the landfill. On average 10%- 20% of landfill wastes are grass clippings. So Fred, I’m not “lazy”, I’m performing a public service for the greater good. So there.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
The 110 Mile Diet - Book Review
100 Mile Diet – A Year of Local Eating
No, you don’t need to walk a 100 miles to lose weight, and if fact this book is not about shedding the personal pounds at all. It is about leaving a lighter environmental footprint on our fragile planet.
The book is a chronicle, told in alternating chapters by the two authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, of their year of eating nothing that they could not source within a 100 mile radius of the downtown Vancouver apartment. The impetus for the experiment was the growing realization that our food travels a very long way to get to us. Consider the Caesar Salad. Lettuce from California, olive oil and parmesan from Italy, anchovies from Spain, Worcestershire sauce from England. A trip of thousands of kilometers, all thanks to our ultimately doomed oil-based global transportation system.
It is a tale of a personal relationship struggling under the stress of no chocolate, no pepper, no olive oil, no ginger. The sorrow of weeks of beets and potatoes. The joy of sourcing wheat and thus pancakes, for the first time in 9 months. It is a tale of two people reconnecting with the local food farmers, farmers markets, and learning to taste, to really taste and appreciate their food for the first time.
What started as a personal experiment has grown into a movement. Check out www.100milediet.org for the full story, to find how you can benefit from eating locally, to see personal stories from other local eaters, and to find an ever growing list of local producers across Canada and the United States.
No, you don’t need to walk a 100 miles to lose weight, and if fact this book is not about shedding the personal pounds at all. It is about leaving a lighter environmental footprint on our fragile planet.
The book is a chronicle, told in alternating chapters by the two authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, of their year of eating nothing that they could not source within a 100 mile radius of the downtown Vancouver apartment. The impetus for the experiment was the growing realization that our food travels a very long way to get to us. Consider the Caesar Salad. Lettuce from California, olive oil and parmesan from Italy, anchovies from Spain, Worcestershire sauce from England. A trip of thousands of kilometers, all thanks to our ultimately doomed oil-based global transportation system.
It is a tale of a personal relationship struggling under the stress of no chocolate, no pepper, no olive oil, no ginger. The sorrow of weeks of beets and potatoes. The joy of sourcing wheat and thus pancakes, for the first time in 9 months. It is a tale of two people reconnecting with the local food farmers, farmers markets, and learning to taste, to really taste and appreciate their food for the first time.
What started as a personal experiment has grown into a movement. Check out www.100milediet.org for the full story, to find how you can benefit from eating locally, to see personal stories from other local eaters, and to find an ever growing list of local producers across Canada and the United States.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
The Road to Hell is Paved with HOV Lanes.
Carpool lanes, also known as HOV lanes or diamond lanes are designed as a relatively low cost solution to traffic congestion. The underlying logic is simple. If every car contained two people then we would have half as many cars on the road, and traffic congestion, the main cause of the ironically named “Rush” hour, would disappear. And while the logic is simple, the reality is less clear.
For example, in Vancouver a special HOV lane was built on one of the busiest in the city. While the number of cars with more than one rider in the morning commute increased from 600 to nearly 1,000, the number of single-occupant vehicles increased 46% to 5,200. That wasn’t foreseen. Neither was the 8% decline in bus ridership. It seems that as people began to ride-share and moved into carpool lanes, it freed up capacity in the regular lanes, encouraged more people to take the route, and because the bus riders saw only a 3 minute saving with the new lane, many of them abandoned the bus in favor of their cars.
So the HOV Lane caused less bus ridership, and in the end, more traffic. Somewhere there is a city planner banging his head on the desk.
For example, in Vancouver a special HOV lane was built on one of the busiest in the city. While the number of cars with more than one rider in the morning commute increased from 600 to nearly 1,000, the number of single-occupant vehicles increased 46% to 5,200. That wasn’t foreseen. Neither was the 8% decline in bus ridership. It seems that as people began to ride-share and moved into carpool lanes, it freed up capacity in the regular lanes, encouraged more people to take the route, and because the bus riders saw only a 3 minute saving with the new lane, many of them abandoned the bus in favor of their cars.
So the HOV Lane caused less bus ridership, and in the end, more traffic. Somewhere there is a city planner banging his head on the desk.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Better Labels, Better World
The idea of consumer education, awareness and responsibility is one that is gaining some traction in activism circles. The idea is that if consumers are aware of the total sum of their actions they will change their actions and behave in a more responsible, sustainable and “green” way.
There are many organizations that strive in through education to change the way consumers behave; PETA (www.peta.org), Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org), World Wildlife Fund (www.wwf.org), and Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org). All four have different ways of trying to change consumers behavior, but my personal favorite are the various Fair Trade Initiatives (www.fairtrade.net) around the world that specifically try to influence consumer behavior through positive labeling schemes.
Maggie and I were talking about this they other day as we stood in Costco and debating which coffee to buy. They carry several brands. Two were organic, and one was fair trade organic. We bought one organic and one fair trade organic, just to try them both out.
Once home, we brewed up a cup, and my mind started doing the jitterbug. “Maggie” I said, “I’ve just had an astonishing idea!” She stood there slack jawed as my ideas raced like a Ferrari across the blacktop of her consciousness. When I was done she took my rest of my coffee and threw it down the sink and walked away. I’m not sure what she meant by that. Oh well.
Producer responsibility should be part of the labeling act for every product, to allow consumers to be able to make better choices. Imagine if you had truth in labeling? “This product made by child slaves in Bangladesh.” or “50,000 gallons of drinking water was polluted in the manufacture of this product.” How would the jewelry industry react if they had to put the warning “20 tons of cyanide-laced tailings were left in a watershed in a third world country to bring you this product.” on that engagement ring you were thinking about.
Drastic? Yes. But the labels on the coffee in Costco allowed us to make a choice. We knew that the brands that weren’t organically certified, or fair-trade certified were products that were produced with pesticides and predatory price structures by large multi national companies ill concerned with the growers or the environment. Nutritional labeling and organic certification have gone a long way to making sure companies produce food that is healthy for both the grower and the consumer.
Perhaps it’s time to move away from the obscure to the exact in an effort to let the consumer, who is after all responsible for 100% of the pollution in the world, be able to make the best choices.
There are many organizations that strive in through education to change the way consumers behave; PETA (www.peta.org), Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org), World Wildlife Fund (www.wwf.org), and Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org). All four have different ways of trying to change consumers behavior, but my personal favorite are the various Fair Trade Initiatives (www.fairtrade.net) around the world that specifically try to influence consumer behavior through positive labeling schemes.
Maggie and I were talking about this they other day as we stood in Costco and debating which coffee to buy. They carry several brands. Two were organic, and one was fair trade organic. We bought one organic and one fair trade organic, just to try them both out.
Once home, we brewed up a cup, and my mind started doing the jitterbug. “Maggie” I said, “I’ve just had an astonishing idea!” She stood there slack jawed as my ideas raced like a Ferrari across the blacktop of her consciousness. When I was done she took my rest of my coffee and threw it down the sink and walked away. I’m not sure what she meant by that. Oh well.
Producer responsibility should be part of the labeling act for every product, to allow consumers to be able to make better choices. Imagine if you had truth in labeling? “This product made by child slaves in Bangladesh.” or “50,000 gallons of drinking water was polluted in the manufacture of this product.” How would the jewelry industry react if they had to put the warning “20 tons of cyanide-laced tailings were left in a watershed in a third world country to bring you this product.” on that engagement ring you were thinking about.
Drastic? Yes. But the labels on the coffee in Costco allowed us to make a choice. We knew that the brands that weren’t organically certified, or fair-trade certified were products that were produced with pesticides and predatory price structures by large multi national companies ill concerned with the growers or the environment. Nutritional labeling and organic certification have gone a long way to making sure companies produce food that is healthy for both the grower and the consumer.
Perhaps it’s time to move away from the obscure to the exact in an effort to let the consumer, who is after all responsible for 100% of the pollution in the world, be able to make the best choices.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
My Salad Just Flew in From Italy, and Boy, are its Wings Tired!
I’ve been married for just three years this July, and so there are things about my wife that I am just learning. For example, I didn’t know until recently that my wife likes hands-free cellular phones. Not that we’ll ever own one, mind you, its just that she has a new way to explain my sometime irascible behavior to innocent bystanders.
For example; a couple of years ago we were standing in the local vegetable store, and Maggie was in line with our produce and I was wandering about looking for treats I could sneak into the buggy before she got up to the till. My wife makes an awesome Caesar salad, so I picked up some mesh bagged garlic. I don’t know if I’d just missed the labeling on the product before, or if it was new labeling, but it said “Product of China”.
Well. I lost it. There I was. I’m standing in the aisle and I’m talking out loud, nope make that raving, flinging my arms in the air, saying “Jumpin Jehosiphats! China? How the heck can this stuff be fresh if it’s coming 10,321 kilometers in some stinking container ship? Why the @#$% can’t we grow this stuff in Canada?”
Maggie shakes her head, and leans over to the women beside her and says “ I think he has one of those new hands-free cell phones. ”
Sometimes it’s best just to humor me. But anyways it got me thinking. We take our food supplies for granted, and we don’t really think about where it all comes from. Take our Caesar Salad for example.
Lettuce from California – 1720 kms. Parmigiano and olive oil from Italy – 9200 kms. Add up the anchovy paste, garlic and other ingredients, and it clocks in at over 37,000 kms!!
It’s easy to dismiss it all with a wave of the hand and “we live in a global economy” hubris. The problem is that all of that food that comes from somewhere else requires oil to get here. The farther the food source, the more oil. And cost. The price of oil is now a greater determinant of food pricing that the actual growing. To put it none too subtly, as the cost at the pump goes up, you can expect your food bill to follow. Research shows that it takes 4 calories of oil energy to get 1 calorie of fresh food to the farm gate. The numbers go up for as the distance grows, and the complexity of the processing increases. Canned and frozen foods are worse, and processed cereals require five times the inherent food energy just to process, let alone grow, package, ship, and store.
I didn’t know all this before I threw the garlic back into the bin and stomped out of the store leaving my wife shaking her head and claiming not to know me. What I did know is that it doesn’t take rocket science to grow garlic.
I headed home, dug up some wilting petunias, and planted some garlic. The first harvest was meager, but it was a start. Being pig headed and logical I’d planted in the spring, which was wrong, as I learned from Ken Stefanson of Gabriola Gourmet Garlic – the Garlic Man that visits the Ladner Village Market each summer. He set me straight. “Nope,” he said, “you’ve got to plant it under the full moon in October. Naked. ”
It’s a good thing I’ve got a tall hedge around my backyard.
And that’s how it started. Each year our garlic harvest gets larger, to the point after an initial purchase of 3 heads, we now grow enough garlic to get us through the year. The garlic heads are as big as my fist, and the taste is amazing. You don’t need much room. It grows all winter. It does wonders for your other flowers, as it acts as a natural deterrent to detrimental insects.
If you miss Ken, you can also order it from Mary Ballon at West Coast Seeds, the best little organic seed farm in BC, right here in Ladner.
Nothing is better than local food. Nothing is more local than your backyard. Happy planting.
For example; a couple of years ago we were standing in the local vegetable store, and Maggie was in line with our produce and I was wandering about looking for treats I could sneak into the buggy before she got up to the till. My wife makes an awesome Caesar salad, so I picked up some mesh bagged garlic. I don’t know if I’d just missed the labeling on the product before, or if it was new labeling, but it said “Product of China”.
Well. I lost it. There I was. I’m standing in the aisle and I’m talking out loud, nope make that raving, flinging my arms in the air, saying “Jumpin Jehosiphats! China? How the heck can this stuff be fresh if it’s coming 10,321 kilometers in some stinking container ship? Why the @#$% can’t we grow this stuff in Canada?”
Maggie shakes her head, and leans over to the women beside her and says “ I think he has one of those new hands-free cell phones. ”
Sometimes it’s best just to humor me. But anyways it got me thinking. We take our food supplies for granted, and we don’t really think about where it all comes from. Take our Caesar Salad for example.
Lettuce from California – 1720 kms. Parmigiano and olive oil from Italy – 9200 kms. Add up the anchovy paste, garlic and other ingredients, and it clocks in at over 37,000 kms!!
It’s easy to dismiss it all with a wave of the hand and “we live in a global economy” hubris. The problem is that all of that food that comes from somewhere else requires oil to get here. The farther the food source, the more oil. And cost. The price of oil is now a greater determinant of food pricing that the actual growing. To put it none too subtly, as the cost at the pump goes up, you can expect your food bill to follow. Research shows that it takes 4 calories of oil energy to get 1 calorie of fresh food to the farm gate. The numbers go up for as the distance grows, and the complexity of the processing increases. Canned and frozen foods are worse, and processed cereals require five times the inherent food energy just to process, let alone grow, package, ship, and store.
I didn’t know all this before I threw the garlic back into the bin and stomped out of the store leaving my wife shaking her head and claiming not to know me. What I did know is that it doesn’t take rocket science to grow garlic.
I headed home, dug up some wilting petunias, and planted some garlic. The first harvest was meager, but it was a start. Being pig headed and logical I’d planted in the spring, which was wrong, as I learned from Ken Stefanson of Gabriola Gourmet Garlic – the Garlic Man that visits the Ladner Village Market each summer. He set me straight. “Nope,” he said, “you’ve got to plant it under the full moon in October. Naked. ”
It’s a good thing I’ve got a tall hedge around my backyard.
And that’s how it started. Each year our garlic harvest gets larger, to the point after an initial purchase of 3 heads, we now grow enough garlic to get us through the year. The garlic heads are as big as my fist, and the taste is amazing. You don’t need much room. It grows all winter. It does wonders for your other flowers, as it acts as a natural deterrent to detrimental insects.
If you miss Ken, you can also order it from Mary Ballon at West Coast Seeds, the best little organic seed farm in BC, right here in Ladner.
Nothing is better than local food. Nothing is more local than your backyard. Happy planting.
Monday, February 12, 2007
One Man's Garbage
After a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of being able to see the floor in the garage for the first time in a decade, Maggie agreed to idea of building a shed to house our bikes and gardening tools. After consulting the feng shui garden designer, we established a site and the shed began.
But this is was not to be an ordinary shed. It was to be created almost entirely of garbage.
It all started with three of my neighbors deciding that it was time to add-on to their houses. In the space of three weeks, three dumpsters were parked in three driveways, and deconstruction began.
Dumpsters were an anathema to my father. He could not, for the life of him, understand why people were throwing away perfectly good items. Items he gladly scrounged and brought home with all the excitement of a boy rescuing a puppy from the pound. “Look at this”, he’d say, a knowing smile on his face. It was always something in relatively good shape; sometimes just needing a coat of paint or a few extra screws, but nothing that we ever exactly needed. At least not at that exact moment. Or ever, as my mother was quick and repeatedly to point out. There were, at any given time, things as varied as a 15’ catamaran sailing boat (my Dad did not sail), a double pedestal oak desk (already had two), perfectly good lumber (for what?), and various lamps (just needs a new plug and a shade), pieces of plate glass, (I don’t know, maybe coasters?).
It’s easy to establish the origins of my father’s packrat nature. My father lived on a farm in Saskatchewan during the Dirty Thirties. In those days, things were not thrown out, they were simply set aside until another use for them could be found. People had so few things, and the sense of community was so strong, that things were repurposed, repaired or shared, rather than dumped. Add that history to a tartan genetic code, and the results are predictable.
So, I guess it’s not surprising that the shed sprang up the way it did.
Across the street, the sounds of prybars and chainsaws began, and so did I. With the approval of my neighbor, and her builder and the demolition crew, I began to scrounge. The roof came off to expose 16 thirteen foot 2x6s. They became studs for the walls. The 2x10 fascia boards were discarded and became the floor joists. Triangle shaped plywood cutoffs from the new roof were born again in a crazy geometry lesson of a floor. A leftover 4 foot section of clear 4x4 yellow cedar was cut and hand split to become a design detail under the gable.
As my two sons and a conscripted neighbor boy worked away, I would enumerate the savings. “Look at this! This piece of 2x6 would cost $8 in the store”, I’d say, grinning away, and the 14 year olds would roll their eyes as loudly as they could.
The two best scrounges of the project came at the end of the construction. I had sided the front of the shed with some reclaimed cedar siding from a fence I had torn down to put up the shed, and I was short cedar for the long side. Resigned to having to go to the cedar mills on River Road, I loaded up the trailer with the few non-usable odds and ends from the job, and headed for the dump, intending to pick up the cedar in the same load.
Imagine my surprise as I was dumping my odd and ends into the bin at the dump when a fellow pulls up with his trailer and is dumping perfect 1x10 pieces of cedar siding from a garage he was tearing down. After some intricate negotiations with the crew at the dump, I filled up my trailer from his, and headed home, loaded down with more cedar than I needed for the job, saving about $200 and part of a tree, and diverting a little waste from the landfill.
A small bit of waste to be sure. Each year the GVRD accepts 1.2 million tons of garbage, but 64% is construction waste. An additional 400,000 tons of demolition and construction waste is sent to private landfills. The only bright in this dark picture is the 70 % that is actually recycled. In fact, the GVRD is one of the leaders in construction waste recycling, with streams for concrete, asphalt, wood, and green waste. Good for us, bad for the rest of North America.
The finishing touch for the job was the shelving for the inside, and for those I turned to Delta Freecycle. I posted a request for storage units and within a day, two offers for shelving appeared in my mailbox. Freecycling is a movement that began in May 2003 to promote waste reduction in Tucson's downtown and help save desert landscape from being taken over by landfills. In two short years the concept has blossomed with 3,203 groups around the world and 1,793,318 members. In Delta the Freecycle community started in June 2004, and now has over 750 members. To find cool stuff, and to get rid of your usable but not required items, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Delta_Freecycle/. Another excellent resource is http://www.vancouver.reuses.com/
The end of this story. My four year old and I were biking this week along Central Avenue, where they are tearing down a couple of old houses to make way for four new ones. As we sat and watched the demolitions machines obliterate the old houses, we could catch glimpses of perfectly salvageble lumber before it splintered in the maw of the machine. My son thought a minute, and then said. “You know Dad, there’s some good 2x4s there.” The torch has been passed.
But this is was not to be an ordinary shed. It was to be created almost entirely of garbage.
It all started with three of my neighbors deciding that it was time to add-on to their houses. In the space of three weeks, three dumpsters were parked in three driveways, and deconstruction began.
Dumpsters were an anathema to my father. He could not, for the life of him, understand why people were throwing away perfectly good items. Items he gladly scrounged and brought home with all the excitement of a boy rescuing a puppy from the pound. “Look at this”, he’d say, a knowing smile on his face. It was always something in relatively good shape; sometimes just needing a coat of paint or a few extra screws, but nothing that we ever exactly needed. At least not at that exact moment. Or ever, as my mother was quick and repeatedly to point out. There were, at any given time, things as varied as a 15’ catamaran sailing boat (my Dad did not sail), a double pedestal oak desk (already had two), perfectly good lumber (for what?), and various lamps (just needs a new plug and a shade), pieces of plate glass, (I don’t know, maybe coasters?).
It’s easy to establish the origins of my father’s packrat nature. My father lived on a farm in Saskatchewan during the Dirty Thirties. In those days, things were not thrown out, they were simply set aside until another use for them could be found. People had so few things, and the sense of community was so strong, that things were repurposed, repaired or shared, rather than dumped. Add that history to a tartan genetic code, and the results are predictable.
So, I guess it’s not surprising that the shed sprang up the way it did.
Across the street, the sounds of prybars and chainsaws began, and so did I. With the approval of my neighbor, and her builder and the demolition crew, I began to scrounge. The roof came off to expose 16 thirteen foot 2x6s. They became studs for the walls. The 2x10 fascia boards were discarded and became the floor joists. Triangle shaped plywood cutoffs from the new roof were born again in a crazy geometry lesson of a floor. A leftover 4 foot section of clear 4x4 yellow cedar was cut and hand split to become a design detail under the gable.
As my two sons and a conscripted neighbor boy worked away, I would enumerate the savings. “Look at this! This piece of 2x6 would cost $8 in the store”, I’d say, grinning away, and the 14 year olds would roll their eyes as loudly as they could.
The two best scrounges of the project came at the end of the construction. I had sided the front of the shed with some reclaimed cedar siding from a fence I had torn down to put up the shed, and I was short cedar for the long side. Resigned to having to go to the cedar mills on River Road, I loaded up the trailer with the few non-usable odds and ends from the job, and headed for the dump, intending to pick up the cedar in the same load.
Imagine my surprise as I was dumping my odd and ends into the bin at the dump when a fellow pulls up with his trailer and is dumping perfect 1x10 pieces of cedar siding from a garage he was tearing down. After some intricate negotiations with the crew at the dump, I filled up my trailer from his, and headed home, loaded down with more cedar than I needed for the job, saving about $200 and part of a tree, and diverting a little waste from the landfill.
A small bit of waste to be sure. Each year the GVRD accepts 1.2 million tons of garbage, but 64% is construction waste. An additional 400,000 tons of demolition and construction waste is sent to private landfills. The only bright in this dark picture is the 70 % that is actually recycled. In fact, the GVRD is one of the leaders in construction waste recycling, with streams for concrete, asphalt, wood, and green waste. Good for us, bad for the rest of North America.
The finishing touch for the job was the shelving for the inside, and for those I turned to Delta Freecycle. I posted a request for storage units and within a day, two offers for shelving appeared in my mailbox. Freecycling is a movement that began in May 2003 to promote waste reduction in Tucson's downtown and help save desert landscape from being taken over by landfills. In two short years the concept has blossomed with 3,203 groups around the world and 1,793,318 members. In Delta the Freecycle community started in June 2004, and now has over 750 members. To find cool stuff, and to get rid of your usable but not required items, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Delta_Freecycle/. Another excellent resource is http://www.vancouver.reuses.com/
The end of this story. My four year old and I were biking this week along Central Avenue, where they are tearing down a couple of old houses to make way for four new ones. As we sat and watched the demolitions machines obliterate the old houses, we could catch glimpses of perfectly salvageble lumber before it splintered in the maw of the machine. My son thought a minute, and then said. “You know Dad, there’s some good 2x4s there.” The torch has been passed.
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