German Farmers Get Juicy
by Treehugger Interns on 11. 5.06
We Treehuggers love recycling, but all too often it involves expending energy to break down perfectly good materials, only to reform them into very similar materials or products later. This is something that McDonough & Braungart refer to as downcycling, after the inevitable loss of quality each time a material is broken down and then reformed. It's much better, then, to either reuse a product for as long as possible, or to find another use for it that doesn't involve breaking it down any more than necessary. Of course, once these options are exhausted, the product should still be suitable for more traditional recycling, which certainly beats throwing it in a big hole in the ground. Ultimately, all products should be designed for reuse and/or intelligent upcycling (another McDonough and Braungart term), but in the meantime we sometimes have to get creative with products that already exist.
The picture above was snapped during a recent cycling holiday in Germany. Fields and fields of grapevines could be seen, their stems cradled by what appeared to be juice cartons, rather than traditional plastic crop-protection tubes. When asked whether this was a green initiative, the farmer whose field this was shrugged. "It's cheaper," he replied. Unfortunately we don't have any details of where the tubes come from, whether they were pre- or post-consumer waste etc. but it does illustrate how efforts to economise can often lead to sensible and efficient use of materials.
Special thanks to Mike and Marjukka Grover for the photo.
[Written by: Sami Grover]
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Gorwing up on a farm in eastern Canada, my family regularly re-used nearly everything that we purchased. This seemed to have been a thing every family did, for as many generations back as we can remember. Feed bags were reused to hold crops of potatoes, cereal cartons and other boxes were used to start fires to heat our homes. Milk bottles were reused for when we were able to milk our own cattle. Tupperware was an unheard of luxury as every single jar of penut butter, jam, etc. was reused to hold everything from leftovers to kids' crayons to seedlings for our orchard.
Now that I've grown up knowing how to live off the land, living and working in a city is unbelievably harsh. I could never imagine living in a suburb where one has just a teaser of land around his/her home but is so restricted in ability to use this land to it's full extent.
I feel frustrated that I have to recycle my papers and containers because I don't know if they're getting the best use (is the truck carrying them to the depot eco-friendly enough? is the process of recycling done in the most efficient manner? is everything I'm sending to the depot REALLY getting recycled?)
One habit I have brought from the farm to city life is the awareness of my purchases. I prefer to buy product in containers I know can be recycled, or reused. I think about how I'm going to use every piece of my purchase when I get home. Until I return to the farm, this is just one of the many ways I will have to keep my family's history close in mind.
My grandparents, farmers in Missouri, also re-used as much as possible. I remember my grandmother saving bread bags and the (back then) wax-paper insert of cereal boxes. Today, I own many of grandpa's tools, including an axe that he fixed using the handle of a scythe...oddly enough, all of these tools, some 70+ years old, are far superior and stronger than just about any tool I could buy today.
Reusing 40lb dog food bags for garbage is great.
Maybe Treehugger should start a category or bulletin board type thing for reuse ideas submitted by readers. For example, a friend of mine also reused empty dog food bags as trash bags, but I'm sure some people who would do so just never thought of that possibility.
Thank you Treehugger for this post. It has been extremely useful for me. I have just spent the weekend bringing to seed a couple thousand pine tree nuts and transplanting them into small old used plastic yogurt containers that I have been storing for the past couple of years. I plan to grow these pine seedlings for a year in these small containers and next fall plant them in the ground to begin reforesting much of my land and the adjoining public land (a forest fire three years back killed a large number of pine trees and the local municipal government doesn't have money to clean up the dead, burnt trees - which I have been stuck doing - much less beginning reforestation), and I have been wondering how I can protect the young pine trees from rabbits and other small animals. It just so happens that I drink only fruit juice (and my own filtered well water) and my wife drinks a lot of milk, so we end up having to take many, many cartons a month to be recycled. I will now start saving them for use next fall as protection for the transplanted pine trees. Thank you very much.
I have six dogs and a lot of dog food bags. I use some of them for storing stuff, such as used carton and paper and other dog food bags, etc., which I then use in the winter for making fires.
I am very interested in recyclying and reuse. I believe doing this is good in theory, but in practice am finding it very difficult to find new homes for my unwanted but still serviceable items.
Perhaps it is a case that people who wish to get rid of things are more aware of the methods of doing so than those who might be interested in getting such items.