What does “real” recycling look like?

Recycled banana box filled with sawdust and carrots

Are you “doing” the politically correct current recycling fad of the day or are you really recycling? John believes in walking the walk here! Sometimes even I roll my eyes but here is his current recycling of recycling of recycling of recycling. This is how he recycles the sawdust left from his tree or pallet cutting. No landfill destination for that.

Note, he doesn’t just go around cutting trees up to get this precious by-product. Only ones that are threatening mans existence. Ever have a tree fall on your house when you were sleeping. Man they’re heavy.

Number one, he recycles the tree or discarded pallet to heat our home. For the “normal” recycler environmentalist this would be enough. No trucking fuel halfway across the world to heat your house. No adding more Co2 into the air (burning wood puts out the same carbon as when a tree dies and decomposes naturally). Local sustainable heating, good exercise, etc. etc. John however adds another recycling dimension to it all.

Number two, he is using the sawdust from cutting up his firewood to store some of the ton of free carrots we harvested over the winter. Remind me to let you know how that worked.

Are you ready for Number three recycling? After we eat the carrots he will use the sawdust in our saw dust toilet. We have a chapter in our book coming out in the this month called “How to save the world with a sawdust toilet”. It will inform you that by this method the body waste gets turned into compost. Compost grows food. The food scraps and body waste from eating this food gets recycled again in the saw dust toilet and then composted once more. Which is then recycled again and again. Now how’s that for recycling?

Don’t worry, he just didn’t come up with this. There is a very good book out on it that will explain how it all works.

Check out The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, by Joseph Jenkins.

Our two books The 7 Pillars of the Frugal Prosumer and The Frugal Prosumer Philosophy go to the printers tomorrow.