Having grown up in Austria, Kathi never really had to deal with the trash her family produced herself. They always had their own composter in the garden for organic matter. Paper, glass, metal and plastic trash, used oil, batteries, old electronics etc., were sorted by their family and were collected separately by their local municipality. One would never really see where the waste would end up - may it be a recycling place or a landfill.
Sam grew up in India where trash was simply thrown outside in front of the house or over the wall behind the house. There was not much of a concept of waste management in India that time. However, these days there are some new ideas being implemented but it is far from anything close to how waste is managed in the U.S.A or in Austria.
Lately we have become more aware of how the trash we are producing is affecting the environment and we are consciously trying to reduce, reuse, and recycle whenever possible. We wrote a blog about the evolution of our mindset about dealing with trash and you can read it here.
We rented a small villa in a village called Ninh Phung in Central Vietnam for six weeks on airbnb.com. When we arrived at our villa our host told us that we should simply throw our trash in the backyard, where it would be later burnt. This concept of burning trash, including plastic, organic waste, metal and whatever type of trash you produce is quite a common practice in this part of the world, but Kathi has also seen this happen in different African countries where she lived and traveled.
It was quite a shock for us to have burning as the only possibility for getting rid of our trash and that it can't be taken "away" by someone else (municipality). Knowing that we don't want to burn our trash and harm the environment, our lungs and our health, we were forced to think about our own consumption patterns, which we think about already, but this time in a lot more detailed way.
The first thing we did, was to create a compost pile in the corner of the backyard, where we collected all our organic waste, dry leaves and grass. We added our waste to this regularly, along with some dry matter, and water. After a few weeks we saw worms and insects making the compost pile their home and converting the organic waste into healthy soil. We hope in a few months the residents of this villa would have some nutritious composted soil to use for their plants.
One thing we found at the house was glass trash. Since there was quite a bit of broken glass all over the backyard and we wanted the place to be safe for us to walk around, we moved it all to a corner with the hope that it would be reused for something by a creative person someday.
We managed our plastic bags by reusing them as much as possible so our plastic trash came down to only torn plastic bags, ear buds and floss. We used them to make ecobricks. Regarding the ecobricks, we are definitely not pro-plastic bricks as we are unaware of the long term health effects of plastic in the form of bricks, but having a choice between burning plastic versus minimising plastic pollution, we would definitely go for usable plastic bricks. We were also looking for other ways to floss our teeth and discovered that we could simply use a single fibre of a multi fibre thread to floss our teeth effectively.
The shape of the bottles we accumulated during our 6 week stay was not convenient to make ecobricks out of, as they typically need to be straight and round like the water bottles. We had a few irregular shaped empty bottles with us like the empty bottles for oil, dishwashing soap and others. Sadly we couldn't get those items in containers other than plastic and we were not willing to give up our cooking for that reason. We carried them to a nearby city with the hope of finding some place to dispose them like a recycling center or a trash container specially meant for plastic. And fate had it that we saw a woman sorting plastic bottles and aluminium cans (to sell them to a recycling centre). So we walked up to her and asked if she would take our bottles. It might have been a strange experience for her to have foreigners walk up to her and ask if they could give her some empty plastic bottles. She was happy to take them and we were super excited that our irregular shaped plastic bottles wouldn't be burnt and they would be reused. We contacted an environmental organisation in Hanoi called Les Pas Verts (Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lespasverts/) regarding the ecobricks we created. They said they would be happy to pick them up from us when in Hanoi. It was a nice way for us to bring closure to all plastic items that we produced as trash during this 6 weeks time.
Another issue we wanted to address was wheat flour and pasta, as they were sold in sealed plastic bags in the supermarket. So we asked around the village for wheat flour and luckily we found a bakery that was selling wheat flour by weight. We bought flour from them in a reusable plastic bag and used it to make breads and our own home made pasta.
The yogurt we bought for Nora came in small plastic cups. We used the empty cups for planting different seeds and grow seedlings before we transferred them to the ground. We will continue to carry them with us and try and reuse them.
Torn clothing was another form of trash that we produced. We found out that cotton decomposes within a few weeks or months. So we cut the torn clothing into small pieces and added them to our organic compost pile.
We walked into this home feeling overwhelmed about how we could possibly manage all aspects of the trash we produced. Surprisingly it turned out to be a positive learning experience for us, as it gave us the opportunity to think about the trash we are producing in a very detailed way.
Recently we saw a video in which they said that "throwing away" is actually not possible, since all our trash is still going to be on this earth that we all live on. We think that we just need to shift our focus that we don't need to recycle more, but maybe we need to reduce our consumption and start producing less waste.
Sam grew up in India where trash was simply thrown outside in front of the house or over the wall behind the house. There was not much of a concept of waste management in India that time. However, these days there are some new ideas being implemented but it is far from anything close to how waste is managed in the U.S.A or in Austria.
Lately we have become more aware of how the trash we are producing is affecting the environment and we are consciously trying to reduce, reuse, and recycle whenever possible. We wrote a blog about the evolution of our mindset about dealing with trash and you can read it here.
We rented a small villa in a village called Ninh Phung in Central Vietnam for six weeks on airbnb.com. When we arrived at our villa our host told us that we should simply throw our trash in the backyard, where it would be later burnt. This concept of burning trash, including plastic, organic waste, metal and whatever type of trash you produce is quite a common practice in this part of the world, but Kathi has also seen this happen in different African countries where she lived and traveled.
It was quite a shock for us to have burning as the only possibility for getting rid of our trash and that it can't be taken "away" by someone else (municipality). Knowing that we don't want to burn our trash and harm the environment, our lungs and our health, we were forced to think about our own consumption patterns, which we think about already, but this time in a lot more detailed way.
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| Image source: http://vrindavanactnow.org/burning-plastic/ |
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| Image source: http://theoscarshorts.com/ |
We managed our plastic bags by reusing them as much as possible so our plastic trash came down to only torn plastic bags, ear buds and floss. We used them to make ecobricks. Regarding the ecobricks, we are definitely not pro-plastic bricks as we are unaware of the long term health effects of plastic in the form of bricks, but having a choice between burning plastic versus minimising plastic pollution, we would definitely go for usable plastic bricks. We were also looking for other ways to floss our teeth and discovered that we could simply use a single fibre of a multi fibre thread to floss our teeth effectively.
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| Image source: http://observers.france24.com/ |
Another issue we wanted to address was wheat flour and pasta, as they were sold in sealed plastic bags in the supermarket. So we asked around the village for wheat flour and luckily we found a bakery that was selling wheat flour by weight. We bought flour from them in a reusable plastic bag and used it to make breads and our own home made pasta.
The yogurt we bought for Nora came in small plastic cups. We used the empty cups for planting different seeds and grow seedlings before we transferred them to the ground. We will continue to carry them with us and try and reuse them.
Torn clothing was another form of trash that we produced. We found out that cotton decomposes within a few weeks or months. So we cut the torn clothing into small pieces and added them to our organic compost pile.
We walked into this home feeling overwhelmed about how we could possibly manage all aspects of the trash we produced. Surprisingly it turned out to be a positive learning experience for us, as it gave us the opportunity to think about the trash we are producing in a very detailed way.
Recently we saw a video in which they said that "throwing away" is actually not possible, since all our trash is still going to be on this earth that we all live on. We think that we just need to shift our focus that we don't need to recycle more, but maybe we need to reduce our consumption and start producing less waste.
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