Page 10 RAIN August/September 198,1 Household Materials That Can Be Recycled Paper: accounts for 50 percent of all municipal waste. Newspaper is 16 percent of that total. And of that amount only 21 percent is currently recycled. It is pulped for re-use and made into insulation. Very easy to recycle and depending on markets well worth the time. new house. Consequently, a housing boom means a good price; a housing crash means a low price. Can be sorted with much labor into more profitable categories. Kraft Paper is brown paper bags and becomes corregated or kraft again. Better to re-use at store. Cardboard is 44 percent of all recyclable paper collected. Usually handled on a commercial level, with large volumes from grocery stores, etc. Becomes cardboard again, here or overseas. Glass: Seven percent of the waste stream, High Grade Paper enters a complex area. Many different grades of varying value. But if contaminated (with carbon paper, magazines, wet-strength paper, etc.) becomes Scrap Paper. Scrap Paper is valued around $3-11 a ton. Used for roofing, felt, chipboard (for boxes). Approximately one ton of scrap paper in a 75 percent of this is cont,ainer glass and is recyclable. It is used mainly for cullet (crushed glass which helps reduce temperature requirements in glass-making, saving energy). If it can be transported to the plant using less than 6 gallons of gasoline/ton of glass, it is energy efficient. But glas·s container manufacture is a centralized technology-those far away from these plants must find other uses. Refill them! Tin Cans: These are de-tinned, our only The Inside Poop On Chinese Ponds by Michael Stusser Large hand-dug ponds are the biological nexus for plants; animals and humans in the Chinese farming system. Human excrement (night soil), animal manures, and other organic refuse are put directly into the ponds to decompose anaerobically. Water hyacinths grown in some ponds cleanse the water and provide food for pigs. Other green crops, grown specifically for fish, are thrown into the ponds. Fish raised .in these ponds provide protein for humans. Sometimes waterfowl are kept in a section of thf pond. During droughts, the ponds are a reserve water supply. Every two years, the ponds are drained and a nutrient rich silt is harvested from the bottom. People carry this ·substance out to the fields in twin baskets suspended from a bamboo pole that is carried across the shoulder. The slurry is spread in the sun and then returned to the soil. Other wastes bypass the ponds. Human urine, collected in the house, is diluted with water in the fi~lds and used on vegetable beds as a ljquid fertilizer. Excess vegetable trimmings and weeds are cooked in a special stew for the family pig. Many families are too poor to eat their own pigs, but must instead sell them to meet expenses, still they are a means for recycling garbage into high quality manure. This manure is either composted briefly and applied to the fields or used as a food source for the whole chain of organisms in the pond. issue of RAIN. domestic source of tin. Using recycled tin cans saves 41 percent of energy needed to mine and process virgin ore. Scrap steel left over is·used in copper smelting and in new steel. (In Oregon, 75 tons of post-c_onsumer tin cans are recycled each month. In Portland, 50 tons are \aridfilled each day! A lot more work needed here). Aluminum: Easily recycled at a good price. Saves 97 percent of energy needed to process virgin ore. Also avoids the tremendous environmental costs of aluminum smelting. Steel aluminum is mostly re-used as the same type of products (containers). It makes more sense to refill aluminum than to recycle it'. This is for the most oart an unnecessary pro~ess. , Michael is an agriculturist who, until recently, was on the staff of the Farallones Institute Rural Center in Occidental, California. This account is based on his observations.during the Farallones/New Alchemy China visit which we told y_ou about in the Feb.lA:far. A longer version of this article appeared in Communities Magazine (No. 48), Box 426, Louisa, VA23093.
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