Ways we recycle
27.09.11
Chinese shopkeepers used flour bags to make pants. The cooking oil tin was cut diagonally in half, a stick was attached to one side and you had a dust scoop. The Crix biscuit tin served a three-fold purpose; as a storage container, improvised musical instrument and cooking utensil for boiling ham over a coal pot or pitch-oil stove.
There was also 101 ways to eat green fig until you were fed up, as recorded in Lord Kitchener’s song Green Fig. The motto then was ‘waste not want not’ and in the Depression-era USA it was ‘use it up, wear it out, make do or go without.’ As they say ‘ole time thing come back again.’ With the current recession-like conditions, it is now cool to brown-bag, or as in my case, Flavorite ice-cream container food to work. Just like back then, paper bags can still be reused to ripen bananas and avocados, and opened and placed on the bottom of trays to roast nuts in the oven. The ubiquitous yogurt, butter or margarine plastic container can be pressed to serve myriad purposes—from an improvised soap dish, kitchen sponge holder, all purpose storage and organiser, spice holder, lunch/snacks container, to a pot for planting seedlings.
Source: Trinidad Guardian
Meet the real green card holders
10.09.11
Of R300 per month, to a garbage-loving retired
rubber technologist in south Mumbai, families from all walks of life across the country are making all sorts of changes to their homes and their lifestyles to reduce their
carbon footprint.
Often, they’re unfairly dismissed as health- and eco-minded hippies. Depending on your idea of environmental friendliness, you could see them that way too. But these people have a certain vision of life and they do their best to live by that vision. Read on to see how and why these families reuse-reduce-recycle, and why you don’t necessarily have to waste the green in your wallet to be ‘green’.
A man of the elements Sanjay Bhalla, an engineer in Delhi with a passion for solar energy – think street lights and
heaters – makes a business out of it
Delhi
From the rooftop of his home in Nizamuddin, you can see the dome of Humayun’s tomb. The same rooftop where Sanjay Bhalla, a self-proclaimed solar enthusiast,
Source: Hindustan Times