Making mead
01.01.70
This year, due in part to the all-pervasive credit crunch, I’m making most of my gifts for family and friends. Trying to use as much of our home-produced goods as possible, I’ve already made
raspberry jam, mincemeat using our own apples, (complete with copious amounts of brandy!), raspberry and blackberry wine, and, of course, as a beekeeper, I have bottled honey in fancy jars, and
made mead.
Mead-making appears to have some mystique about it, even among those that make their own fruit/hedgerow wines.
However, if you have ever made wine, and so got the basic equipment, it is not hard to do, though it does take a lot longer to ferment out than traditional types of fruit wines, that normally take
about eight weeks.
Usually, I make my mead from honey washings, (a by-product of extracting the honey from the comb.) But it can be done much less messily from jars bought from local beekeepers, or, even, dare one
say, from imported honey from supermarkets, though the flavour of the finished product, because of the blending and heating processes involved, is guaranteed to be more bland.
Source: Smallholder
Recycling: An all-access pass to recycling in the Twin Cities
01.01.70
Plant Manager.
Waste Management's MRF
From your street, Waste Management curbside recycling goes to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). The Waste Management MRF in northeast Minneapolis is among the biggest in the country, moving a massive 250,000 tons of recycling a year.
"We take in anywhere from 80 to 120 trucks a day," Saladis said about the MRF.
The facility creates 300 bales of newspaper, 175 bales of cardboard and 65 bales of plastic every day. Add the other commodities and Saladis says the Minneapolis MRF stacks a daily total of 600 bales of recyclables.
The MRF combines a series of stations that use air flow, gravity, magnets and optics to separate items into different streams.
"The larger stuff travels over the top and the smaller material falls through the bottom," Saladis said about the system of sorters. "The stuff that falls out the bottom is conveyed to another step."
Cardboard and newspaper are reused in the paper industry. Things like laundry detergent bottles can be made into new plastic containers. Pop and water bottles are used in a variety ways, including in the making of carpet and fabric.
Source: KARE
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