Celebrate Earth Day

The 5Rs of Rubbish:
responsibly
reduce, reuse, recycle & recover

How can you reduce your energy consumption, your waste production, and help the environment? Here is a list of simple things you can do, starting today:

1. Walk up and down the stairs every day;
2. Cut 1 minute of your shower time every day until you shower for a maximum of 5 minutes, and reward yourself with a long relaxing bath once a week once you have reached this goal;
3. Wet your toothbrush, cloth or shaving brush/razor and turn the tap water OFF while you shave, wash or clean your teeth. Rinse using a cup of water;
4. Make sure all electrical appliances are unplugged when not in use;
5. Take your own shopping bag(s), whether it be cloth, paper or from recycled material, when you go shopping, and leave spare bags in the car and one in your handbag;
6. Say “NO” to plastic bags when someone automatically starts to put your purchases in a plastic bag. Ask for a recycled paper bag, and better still, carry a spare with you all the time;
7. Money talks – tell your suppliers to adopt more energy efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. If they need help to do this, suggest they contact Clean Up Egypt. A great example of how this has been implemented is IKEA, who not only practice what they preach, but enforce the same behaviour from their suppliers, with particular emphasis on ensuring children are not being used in production and waste materials are not dumped;
   Walk once a week to an appointment you have, whether it be a lunch date, a visit to the hair-dresser, or to the office. A good walking speed is 10 minutes per kilometre, so in half an hour you will already have walked 3 km (see www.cairowalkinggroup.com or email muhammadfarag@gmail.com to join);
8. Are you a two car household or a one car household? Try one week using just one car;
   Buy fresh food which is not pre-packaged, and buy in bulk – fill small containers with the serving size required at home eg instead of individual 100g yoghurt tubs buy 1kg and divide as needed;
9. Keep a water bottle (like cyclists use) for picnics, in the car, in your bag, in the children's school bags, and say “NO” to bottled water. Use a filter on your water tap, and fill your water bottles before you step out;
10. Cook at home once a week using a solar cooker – ask if you would like a demonstration on how to make and use your own, or where you can purchase these;
11. Use candles for gentle lighting at night – scented candles of tea tree, citronella and geranium are particularly effective against mosquitos. Ask if you would like to know where you can purchase these or how to make your own;
12. Keep your air-conditioning set to a minimum of 26 degrees celsius and use light colours to reflect heat. You won't notice such a difference when going outside on hot days, and you will acclimatise more easily;
13. Park your car in a shady spot and turn the engine OFF if you have to wait in the car – leave the battery on if you want to use the fan or air conditioner;
14. Grow your own food – it tastes better, is delivered fresh to your own doorstep and you can use all kinds of different containers, such as 1kg yoghurt tubs, tetrapaks, plastic bottles to hold your plants;
15. Cook at home and limit take-outs and home-deliveries to once a week, then once a fortnight, then once a month.....;
16. Avoid meat for at least one day a week – it takes 10kg of edible grain to produce 1kg of meat, and ruminant animals produce large quantities of methane, which is 20 times worse in its effect on the atmosphere than C02;
17. Take up a craft such as knitting or crocheting recycled plastic bags into a duffle bag, sandals, place mats, shower curtains – if this isn't your style, donate your clean plastic bags to people who are recycling plastic this way;
18. Once a month, offer to plant (and do so) a mulberry tree in each school within walking distance of your home or office;
19. Separate your garbage according to the sorting tips provided, and make sure your waste is being appropriately managed by your waste collector ie being reused, recycled or having its energy recovered eg waste oil converted to biodiesel, and not ending up as landfill;
20. Aim to implement at least one of the tips on this page each week so that these become part of your normal routine.

worms worms worms

Amid quite a bit of fan-fare and no little amount of paper shuffling, the compost worms arrived about 3 weeks ago to begin their job of munching their way through vast quantities of organic waste, and reproducing ad infinitum....hopefully. This project would have been in no way possible without efforts on both the Australian side and the Egyptian end, particularly the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. Contrary to the popular opinion that working with government results in going nowhere fast, the clearance papers were drummed up in less than 2 days, when the Australian Quarantine people requested more than my verbal declaration that "it was all organised in Egypt, no problem" to export the worms, and in less than 2 days of arrival the worms had cleared Egyptian quarantine, albeit with over one hundred signatures accompanying their release!

It might however, have been better, if the worms had not made it quite so quickly out of quarantine....The first evening the worm bed was attacked by a pack of dogs, so on arrival in the morning there were large quantities of dried out worms dispersed dead or dying in the pit that had been constructed. We rescued the remaining worms and built them the equivalent of a brick barbecue about a metre high, 1 wide and about 2 metres long, covered during daylight hours with recycled white foam trays, and during the evening with an old cast-iron piece of fencing that needed four people to shift.

The iron grid proved sufficient to keep the dogs at bay, however meant that at least 4 people had to be about every morning to check on the worms. So after a week of heaving iron, an less heavy 2-person dark green cover was located. Very good in theory, until the day that nobody checked on the worms and the temperatures hit 35 degrees. As luck would have it, I had also put in a sprinkling of lovely new rabbit droppings the night before. The ammonia sky-rocketed, the worms dived, and the top surface layers of the bed were hot enough to cook an egg.....needless to say that meant a few more worms expired. A lesson in the dynamics of solar energy!

Happily, yesterday we achieved our first bed separation - the worm numbers have outgrown their original bed so we created three new beds and 3 breeding beds. The only problem is the breeding beds are only 10cm high, and tomorrow's temperatures are expected to top 40 degrees! Looks like I won't be staying that long at the Earth Day event....

Earth Day here in Egypt is sponsored by CSA who kindly have agreed to a display of worms and a demonstration on how to green your roof and produce your own food, using recycled material to create a rooftop or balcony garden. Naturally, worm castings and worm tea form the basis for the plants' food.

We have also included some 20 odd tips for how to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover energy from household waste, for visitors to the Earth Day Event to take home and place somewhere prominent in their dwellings.

The EEAA proposal is still just that - a proposal. It seems we need at least two agencies to sit together, and trying to get either to first pick up the phone to make the appointment is easier said than done. So efforts have been directed to helping existing community based waste management efforts, by either locating low cost technology for recycling the nasties such as plastic and cigarette butts, in ways which are environmentally friendly and result in more energy output than input to convert, as well as training in worm husbandry!

We are also to begin making expanded clay from ground brown glass, and bricks from plastic. A bone-grinder is due to arrive in the next few weeks in which to crush these materials. GTZ, the Geman arm of technology transfer, funded a project in Argentina on producing plastic bricks, and have agreed to pass on the technology - hopefully soon. We will start experimenting anyway!

Meetings with larger corporations on how to improve energy efficiency and achieve zero waste have been progressing very well. There is a lot of enthusiasm at the corporate level to go "green" especially if it makes economic sense.

Wadi Environmental Sciences Centre, a non profit organisation which runs hands-on science based experiments to help children better understand environmental impacts, is presenting World Environment Day with the British Council, based around 6 topics including Air, Water, Health under the theme "Kick the Habit". Collaboration has been going well, with lots of ideas for hands-on activities during the day being generated.

What can you do with your left-over plastic bags? Here are some ideas:
1. Iron the bags together between two sheets of paper until about 8 layers thick. When you have about 1 metre square of "material" cut a hole for your head and hey presto, a rain poncho.
2. Cut the grips of the plastic bag and open it out into one piece. Fold over and roll into a long tube. Cut 1cm strips from the tube and tie the ends together. Wrap this "twine" around an old toilet paper roll, and knit or crochet into a place mat, carry bag, even sandals.