I live in a north facing apartment block and since I erected a canopy over the windows to keep out the summer sun, I seldom have any real desire to use an air-conditioner. The apartments are all very well insulated so that we don’t hear sound from one to another. Really quite environmentally friendly.

We have a series of recycling bins in the basement – I feel that if they were better labelled for cans, bottles, plastics etc it would be better. Paper is pre-sorted and most of us are good about using these. The household waste has to be bagged and put down a shute with organic waste going into an in-sink-erator that grinds it up which prevent odours in the waste bins but does add to the biological load in the sewer. I use a worm farm on my terrace in winter but the heat on the tiled surface cooks them in summer.
My concern is for bagging the rubbish. Like most council waste, our waste all must be bagged and I have not found a satisfactory biodegradable bin liner bag that I can use that avoids plastic bag use. With the Federal Environment Minister wanting to make plastic shopping bags illegal by the end of the year, it would be great if all the bin liners sold were biodegradable too. In Australia almost 50% of shoppers bring their own cloth bags for shopping but here are still millions of the plastic bags entering the environment and killing wildlife, especially when they reach the sea and are mistaken for edible jelly fish by wildlife who then choke to death.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 1:24 am and is filed under water resources & pollution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.