Eco-Tec: Building homes from plastic bottles

Of all the materials that you could possibly use to build a house, plastic bottles are the last thing you would expect to actually work. They do, and surprisingly well. A group called Eco-Tec, based in Honduras, has proven that with some sand, a lot of ingenuity, and a desire to give people affordable housing it's very possible.

You can go to their website here and learn all about their projects and priorities. Their biggest mission: training people how to use waste materials (like bottles) with whatever else is available (like sand or soil) to build effective, practical structures. This goes hand-in-hand with their community recycling/reusing pickups, where they get everyone to contribute even if it's as simple as finding plastic bottles.  Over the past 7 years they've done a number of incredible projects, from aqueducts and water tanks to full fledged houses. You can check out a ton of really cool pictures from their projects, and other incredible plastic bottle works from around the world at Inspiration Green.

According to their website Eco-Tec also specializes in composting and vermiculture. Their main english website is here, upon entering you can watch a video that gives a great overview of what they're about. These things go hand-in-hand with educating people in impoverished areas of the world to build effective structures from materials that would otherwise be inefficiently recycled, sitting in a landfill, or simply littered across the land. Altogether this makes Eco-Tec an incredibly important organization that deserves to thrive.

The Humanure Handbook

The Humanure Handbook:
A Guide to Composting Human Manure,
Third Edition

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure
by Joseph C. Jenkins is an amazing book for anyone interested in composting their own human waste (which you all should be!) As gross is it may sound, it isn't, if you do it correctly. This book gives tons and tons of background info for composting all around, and will easily show you how to build a cheap but effective sawdust toilet. Almost all reviewers have stated that it has practically no smell, at least no more than any other bathroom.

You may be asking yourself why in the hell should you compost your human waste? If you enjoy flushing about 6 gallons of clean drinking water down the drain every time you use your porcelain piece-of-shit, please, stick your head in it next time. Maybe it will swirl some sense into you. I'm sure at one point the modern toilet was an amazing technological advancement, but continuing to use it on a wide-scale basis is absurd. And if you think 6 gallons is a lot, read my post on 30 minute showers.

If that's not enough convincing, did I mention you're getting FREE amazing compost out of the deal? You might think it's gross to picture a cycle of eating, excreting, and growing, but it makes perfect sense. And when done correctly, you won't be able to tell your finished humanure from overpriced bags of compost at a garden center.

Even if you don't think you're ready to undertake that task quite yet, I strongly recommend you read this book just because of it's wealth of information and ecological viewpoint of the author. If you're at all interested in improving the quality of life on this planet, I guarantee you will find something useful and motivating in this book. Click here to get the Humanure Handbook

I promise it won't smell.

Weekly Waste War: Newspaper

Come on, you DO know that your never going to read that 1983 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the one that has a guy on the front that looks like you? I mean, yes, it's memorable, perhaps not as memorable as that potato chip that looked like Jesus (or was it a cheeto?), but still something you feel you should hang on to. And then the week after that was printed on the same day as your mother's birthday, and she demanded you keep that one. And then you kept the next one, and the next one, and the next one.....

If you haven't been swallowed up the cascading waves of newspapers, it's time to swallow your hoarder's pride and do something useful with all that paper.

Buycott: Buy from companies you love, boycott those you don't

Buycott is a new, and so far unique smartphone app that let's you scan products in a store and see exactly what company it comes from, and what they stand for. Basically, you scan a jar of pasta sauce, made by company A. Well in reality company A is owned by company C whose parent company is D, and they're a bunch of f***ing A**holes that you don't want to support. That's right, put it back on the shelf. You can create campaigns, for example, "against GMO's," and it'll instantly tell you if the food your buying conflicts with those interests, without actually having to do research on any of those companies. It's not perfect yet, but it's definitely a step in a great direction. And the biggest thing it needs is users supporting it. It's available for Android and iOS, and is free. Click on the link to learn more or download it.

Buycott App

Charity: Water

Charity: water is a 100% nonprofit organization that has helped give thousands of people access to clean drinking water. They even prove that every penny of your donation goes to help developing countries gain access to water through photos and GPS coordinates. Click on the map to see all the projects they have completed so far. As of writing this they have funded 8,661 projects in 20 different countries, and they've only been around since 2006.

How to: Rain barrel

Rain barrels are a great way to utilize water that is otherwise running rampant across your lawn. While it can be even more effective to landscape your yard and rain gutters to naturally water your garden and lawn, doing so can be much more expensive, and usually permanent.

Rain barrels are cheap, easy to make, and much more customizable with many more uses.In addition to watering, you can generally use them in place of your hose, like washing your car, rinsing off that patio furniture, or giving the dog a bath.

You can purchase rain barrels from various places, but it's monumentally cheaper and more rewarding to build your own. Here's the best way I found to make a rain barrel from instructables.com, by stylnpzzalvr

Weekly waste war: Turn Dryer Lint into waterproof fire starter

This is the first post in what I hope to be a weekly series based on combating (that's right, ass kicking!) waste in your daily life. Even the smallest and easiest things you can do to waste less can have the biggest impact, because everyone can do it, whether you're rich, poor, a moron or a rocket scientist. And it's much more important to look at what we can do and just do it instead of looking at what we can't change or thinking we can't make a difference.

After that incredibly motivating speech, you're probably ready to live 100% sustainable and never waste an ounce of anything in your life, but let's start out small, with dryer Lint. Probably the easiest and most common thing to reuse in your house. It probably has one of the smallest impacts on landfills and such, but it's not just about the waste. It's about turning something that you normally would have no use for into something useful. Whatever it is, this offsets energy and money being spent through what you've created or partially created from reusing something that you thought was useless.