Incremental behaviour changes for waste management

 My mom thinks I'm a bit radical when it comes to recycling, composting and waste. 

I separate my trash into general and recyclables for our municipal waste collection. Our general waste is low - less than a shopping bag each week. Recyclables - from packaging - make up the bulk. We're fortunate to have a municipal collection of recyclables in George, but really, recycling is not the solution to waste. Not bringing these items into your home in the first place is the solution.

I compost organics in my YOLO Compost Tumbler.

I ecobrick plastic packaging and take my ecobricks to the environmental centre at the Botanical Gardens (previously I sent them to collection projects).

I save plastic bottle caps for the Sweethearts Foundation - these come from home, work and those I pick up off the roads/trails.

I don't use straws (even paper ones). I have a reusable, glass, Restraw for those times when I want to use a straw for a milkshake, smoothie or beverage.

I love my fabric shopping bags and have not bought a plastic bag in about four years (and at this stage it was only about 4 bags that year!). I've got smaller net bags to use for loose fruits and veg. These live in my car and handbag.

If I know I'm going to get takeout, I take along my own containers. I do use long-lasting, reusable plastic containers for almost everything from lunch at work to leftovers in the fridge, and takeout.

I've got bowl covers to use instead of cling wrap.

I swopped to cotton buds with paper stems when they became available a few years ago. 

I abhor disposable face masks. There is no good reason you can give me to justify their use when there are washable, fabric masks readily available.

I stopped buying baby wipes years ago. If I may need these like, for example, when on a roadtrip, I have a facecloth and bottle of water in the car.

I switched to a Mooncup and washable cotton pads more than six years ago to replace disposable pads and tampons.

I didn't start off doing all of these things. One-by-one I've added one conscious behaviour and then another so that they have become habits over time. 

I'll walk out of a store with my goods bundled into a 'pouch' of my tee-shirt rather than purchase a plastic shopping bag (principle, not cost). If I visit a place without composting, I would rather dig my banana peel into your garden (or a bed on the sidewalk) than put it into your trash bin. I save bottle caps that I pick up to add to my collection - I just can't leave them on the ground.

If you, like me, are in your 40s or older, you will have parents who grew up without clingwrap, ziplock bags, shopping bags and mountains of packaging, and too many disposable, single-use products. What has happened to us?

Enviroment-conscious actions have to be as convenient as the waste-generating behaviours to which we have become accustomed. 

Small, light and compact reusable fabric shopping bags, like my Forget-me-not Pouch from SUPA (Single Use Plastic Alternatives) has made it easy to always have a fabric shopping bag on hand for when I pop into the shops. My YOLO Compost Tumbler has changed the game for me in terms of composting convenience and effectiveness.

Have I arrived at Zero Waste status? No. I'm not even close. I'll count my actions as progress when I can seriously cut the amount of packaging that goes out each week for recycling collection and to eliminate my use of single-use products. 

In December, I babysat my mom's dog for two weeks. A Maltese, Bella gets tear-stained cheeks. We've got an eye solution that we use to wipe her eyes daily. To apply the wipe, we use a cotton pad. I did her eyes twice a day. That's two cotton pads a day. I started washing them to reduce my waste. They do last a few washes but the disposability and waste of this process really hit me.

Around this time an ad popped up on social media for the Danish-designed LastObject products - reusable cotton pads and earbuds. Of course, this caught my attention.

We've got a Danish customer who was heading this way in January. I ordered, had them sent to him and he brought the products out for me. 

It was love at first sight. Both of these are practical and functional, and they come in great colours with outstanding design. The earbud should last 1,000 uses and each round (cotton pad alternative) is good for at least 250 uses (there are 6 in each pack). The rounds can be machine washed. They are made from cotton and wood fibres so they can be composted at the end of their life.

I got in touch with LastObject because these products beautifully complement my YOLO Compost Tumblers. They agree too. I'm in the process of putting together my first order.

I also reached out to Restraw. I first ordered their glass straws about six years ago. They reminded me of glass pipettes from the lab in my past life. I broke my Restraw a few months ago after it slipped out of its holder when my bag when flying. I made contact with them and will be adding these to my YOLO shop - because I really like them and they work.

We certainly can't plead ignorance when it comes to waste and the environment. There are alternatives and replacements so it really falls on us to be more conscious and to see how we can change our behaviours - one at a time - to do better.

Building a garden for The Joburg International Flower Show

During this past week, I was involved with building a garden for The Johannesburg International Flower Show, a new event created to be South Africa's equivalent of the 'Chelsea Flower Show'. I teamed up with landscaper Danielle Day - The Garden Girl. We'd met last year through YOLO. I love her work and ours has been a great partnership.

Dan created our design for a kitchen courtyard garden - it is charming. What I love most about it is that you'll look at our garden and think, "This is awesome, I can do something like this in my courtyard / small garden space". And you can!

Dan had a clear plan for the week starting with the layout of the site on Monday and brick laying of the pathway and perimeter to installing our wall and washing line, the planting boxes, and then the planting and finishing touches.

What was really exciting is that we use my pre-production YOLO Concrete Mixer to mix the concrete to plant poles. The one challenge we'll have in the marketing of this unit is really around behaviour change. If you've mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow for 15 years, it will take a bit to change to using something that is neater, cleaner and more convenient purely because it is different.

Using the pre-production YOLO Concrete Mixer for stand building. We emptied a 40kg concrete premix bag into the YOLO and added water. The tap was downhill - about 15m from our stand. We rolled the YOLO up to where we needed it and poured the concrete into the holes for the poles. Job done.

Compost delivery - kindly sponsored for our show garden by Stanler Farms. This compost is so rich.

Paved walkway. We used bark chips in the gaps and for the rest of our flooring.

Composting plays a big role in any garden to improve soil quality and provide nutrients to plants. The theme of our garden is "From table to garden" because all of the organic materials that come out of your kitchen as a result of meal preparation can go straight into a YOLO Compost Tumbler to create compost that can go into your garden. Less trash going out of your home and more goodness going into your soil.

We've incorporated a medium-sized YOLO Compost Tumbler in our kitchen courtyard garden.  Organic material from your kitchen and home, like fruit and vegetable peeling, egg shells, egg trays, tea bags, and coffee grounds can go straight into your YOLO. And the compost, can go straight back into your garden.

Danielle has cleverly planned our four planting boxes with plants for Health & Immunity, Digestion, Skin and Mental Health. Take a look at the plants, see what you can identify. Which colour corresponds to each health theme? Elands Nursery kindly provided the strong and healthy plants that decorate our stand.

We've got garden judging on Monday afternoon and the show starts on Wednesday through to Sunday. It should be an interesting adventure this week.

Hand 'em down to reuse

I like hand-me-downs, items of clothing that are passed from one person to the other.

About two years ago we had a clothes swap here in Parys. A bunch of girls all got together with bags of clothing that they no longer wore / didn't fit / didn't like and we all got pieces that look great on us. It was a fun evening of dress-up. All of the garments that I chose, I wear regularly throughout the year.

I have often, over the years, given away garments that just didn't work for me. I remember a pair of jeans that I never settled into that I passed onto a friend. I thought they would be perfect for her. It turns out that they were. I had forgotten about them and a few months later I visited her and happened to remark on how great her jeans looked on her and where did she get them. "From you," was her reply. They didn't look that good on me!

Other items I have passed on to domestic helpers for themselves, family and children. It really does work just to pass clothing on if they are are doing nothing but hibernating in your cupboard.

With two children in my life, I value hand-me-downs even more because, at 11 and 13, these creatures grow like weeds. They have barely fitted into something when they're already out of it. And many items don't get a lot of wear before they're too small. A neighbour passed on some of her too small items more than 18-months ago for Kyla. Some of the dresses were perfect to a little big and a really cute pair of jeans and a denim skirt were too big but worth keeping for her to grow into. The jeans are now just right and on Friday I put up the hem so that she can now start to wear them.

The children know to put outgrown clothing on the 'Table of Everything' and I pass these on.

Hand-me-down applies not only to clothing, but also to shoes, furniture, appliances, linen, tools, crockery and even spectacles and frames (hand in at an optometrist). Anything that one person no longer uses and that can be used by another.

It was serendipity that I bumped into man from town at the local auction where I was looking for an old wooden ladder. I didn't find anything there but two days later he called to say that his friend was moving and she had an old wooden ladder that she couldn't take with her to her new, smaller home. I picked up the ladder from him a few days later and with a lick of paint it will serve my decorative purposes.

The road to Zero Waste is paved with 5 Rs - Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rot (compost) - in this order. Hand-me-down clothing ticks the Reuse box.

Returnable box project for YOLO

We received our new double-walled boxes for our large YOLO Compost Tumblers last week. They're very strong and, well, large! Packaging is expensive and so wasteful. When I picked up our large boxes last week, a quick chat with our box supplier gave me an idea...

The box for our large YOLO Compost Tumbler is returnable. We want the boxes back so that we can reuse each one a number of times before it is retired to compost. Every time that we send out a large YOLO Compost Tumbler, we'll include three reusable velcro straps inside the box, which will be used to secure the box and flaps. We'll arrange for our courier to collect the box from the customer to bring it back to us.

I must have looked pretty comical yesterday. In these photos you can't quite gauge how big the box is. It is 1210mm long, 800mm wide and 820mm high. It weighs 4.5kg.

For now, we're just doing the large box as returnable. My next box order for the medium tumblers will be for the double-walled version and we'll probably make these returnable too.

 As we order small quantities i.e. 20 or 30 units as opposed to minimum order quantities of 250 or more (new business cash flow challenges!), the price that we pay per box is really high. It saves us money to courier the box back to reuse. The benefits really are aligned here with saving money and being able to reuse the boxes so that we generate less waste. We also take the problem of disposing of such a large box off our customers' hands.

We are fortunate that our customers are environmentally-minded; they have embraced our returnable box project with enthusiasm and appreciation.

The first return comes back to us next week.

Measuring our YOLO Compost Tumbler's social impact

Last week I submitted an application for Chivas Regal's 'The Venture' business awards. "We're looking for innovative start-ups that use business to solve global social or environmental challenges," their website stated.

"The Chivas Venture is a global search to find and support the most promising start-ups with the potential to succeed financially and make a positive impact on the lives of others. One social entrepreneur from each participating country will make it to the global final and have a chance to win a share of $1 million in funding."

It took me four hours to complete the application and in the process I wrote almost 3,000 words. One of the questions asked about the social impact of our product and asked for figures, if possible. As I had no idea how to measure the social impact of our compost tumblers, I turned to Google. A response in one of the dozen pieces I looked through suggested looking at my customers and assessing where they were before the intervention and what changed afterwards.

 Our YOLO Compost Tumbler solves a problem for our customers: what to do with their organic waste. Many people in apartments, townhouses, estates and retirement complexes cannot have compost heaps (due to space or rule restrictions). Those on properties with sufficient space deal with other issues like pests (rodents, snakes, monkeys, dogs), complexity of heap management and lack of interest that prevents them from composting their organic waste.

Before my customers bought their YOLO Compost Tumblers, their organic waste (kitchen and garden) went out on the street for collection by their municipality on trash day. These bags of organic waste would then end up at landfill sites where they rot anaerobically, under tons of garbage, to give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

 After my customers receive their YOLO Compost Tumbler, their organic waste goes into the tumbler - instead of the trash. The contents get regularly mixed and aerated, and around three months after emptying their first tub of kitchen cuttings into  the first shell, my customers are able to dig a shell of nutrient-rich compost into their gardens, gift to a friend or donate to a community gardening project. That they get nutrient-rich compost out is very much a positive byproduct of YOLO's problem-solving function.

As the YOLO Compost Tumbler has two shells, one will be active and the other maturing so after the first shell has been filled, the customer enters a cycle where every six to eight weeks they're emptying a shell of matured compost.

 How can we allocate numbers to this process?

 Consider 100 YOLO Compost Tumblers. Assuming that between our users of small, medium and large units, they may average one black bag of organic waste (kitchen & garden) per week during the year (more waste in summer, less in winter). For each customer, that equates to 52 black bags a year that would have been put on the street for municipal collection.

For 100 customers, this is 5,200 bags in a one-year period. Accounting for only 100 units, we can already see the social impact and potential for incredible growth with every YOLO Compost Tumbler that finds a happy home.

 This is also about more than the actual organic waste materials. This is about the 5,200 less garbage bags that have to be picked up by municipal workers. This is about the 5,200 less bags of waste that are dumped at landfill sites. This is also about the 5,200 black plastic bags will no longer be used once-off and discarded.

 In addition, every other form of waste recycling has a long chain of interactions that have to happen. Plastics, for example, can be separated at home and put out for informal recycling collectors to pick up or these can be dropped at a recycling bin or centre. At the recycling centre, plastics are further separated. They're compacted and transported to a facility that can turn the waste plastic into plastic pellets - or the like - that another company can purchase to manufacture products from the recycled material.

With a YOLO and your own organic waste, no further intervention is necessary. Neither collectors, transporters, nor manufacturers. Kitchen cuttings and garden material decompose inside the YOLO shell and a product results - mature compost. This can be dug directly into the garden to put valuable nutrients back into the soil for our vegetables, flowers and other plants to absorb.

This is the measurable social impact of our YOLO Compost Tumblers. And we're only just beginning.