So will you pee in your sink ?

Human urine is loaded with nitrates , great for the plants and every time you use the loo you flush down 5-10 liters of clean drinking water to flush it away. Now for an entirely hypothetical solution. Say your spouse is averse to not flushing the loo after every use and equally averse to bottles of pee in the loo and you have a greywater system connected to the bath sink that goes to the plants outside, would you let all of these nitrates go waste along with fresh potable water or would you pee in your sink ?

So do you want a free telephone directory ?

So yesterday the telephone company distributed telephone directories in Jerusalem . Loads and loads of big fat directories to everyone , want it or not . Who uses a telephone directory these days ? The print I realised was so small that a granny ( I am assuming its only the granny generation would use a directory ) wouldn't be able to read a thing . Unless you are referring to the Yellow Pages . There is directory service at 144 ( you pay for it ) , there is directory service on the internet at Dapey Zahav and many others . And then it struck me , it is for the yellow pages , it is an advertisement as all the junk 'supplements' that one gets with the weekend newspaper , like the junk newspaper that one is handed out on the traffic crossing . But then how much does this add to the waste stream ? Yesterday the street was littered with the directories and tomorrow all the bins will be full of directories since nobody will bother to take the old ones for recycling . I weighed the directory and it weighs about 800 grams , with a very conservative estimate of 100,000 directories distributed in Jerusalem , it works out to 80 tonnes of newsprint . If 12 pines 40 feet (12.2m) tall, 8 inches (20cm) in diameter trees give a ton of newsprint , so that works out to 960 trees !! If the trees are spaced at 3 meters , each tree takes 9 sq.m which works out to 8640 sq.m of forest . So for the pleasure of distributing free directories in the city of Jerusalem we cut down nearly a hectare of of forest which is between 10-14 years . And we did not begin to talk about the energy required from the raw material stage to the delivery of the product .

So how many trees would make a ton of paper?

Claudia Thompson, in her book Recycled Papers: The Essential Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), reports on an estimate calculated by Tom Soder, then a graduate student in the Pulp and Paper Technology Program at the University of Maine. He calculated that, based on a mixture of softwoods and hardwoods 40 feet tall and 6-8 inches in diameter, it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper, using the kraft chemical (freesheet) pulping process.

If we assume that the groundwood process is about twice as efficient in using trees, then we can estimate that it takes about 12 trees to make a ton of groundwood and newsprint. (The number will vary somewhat because there often is more fiber in newsprint than in office paper, and there are several different ways of making this type of paper.)

Some more paper stats here .

Biomass

Yesterday I found a huge pile of yard waste from the neighbouring building . All in all I brought in nearly a cube of biomass to the garden to add to the nearly sterile soil in the garden . A lot of grass , a significant amount of mustard and similar weeds . On the way to work I saw quite a few of these biomass piles all destined for the municipal dump .

Food

For the last couple of months I have been reading voraciously about food , organic , backyard , the ills of industrial monocultures , Fukuoka , Geoff Lawton , the broken nutrient cycles , Monsanto , the Future of food , Permaculture , Bill Mollison, Emilia Hazelip and more . It is quite clear that my mind is made up , industrial production of food is bad for me and my family and the environment . So time to take the plunge seriously into growing my own food or part of it and at the same time utilize wastes that we create in a manner that is not only non destructive but also adds to the immediate environment . Not that this is the first time I am trying to do so , I have at least two seasons of growing but not producing anything with my blessed black thumb but I believe I have reached a point where I have enough know how to do it better . We will be using greywater from our bath , composting all our kitchen and yard wastes and using a lot of mulch .

Greywater system

Today we finalised the greywater system that we are going to install . It is a very basic setup , greywater from the bath and the washing machine goes in a subterranean tank with a submersible pump which pumps it up to the terrace . The contractor is going to do the job of pumping up the terrace and I will make the rest of the filtration system which is essentially going to be a trench with gravel . The water will be released into a subsurface drip system . Schematically it is going to be like this .
If the water pump is 0.5 kw and takes even as much as half an hour everyday to pump up the water , the monthly consumption of electricity will be 15 Kwh which at 0.50 shekels/Kwh works out to 7.50 shekels a month or less than 2$ a month . The water saved will definitely offset the cost of running the pump .