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Stick a toilet-plunger out the front of that thing and you’d have a smelly Dalek.

I didnt realize that they had hippies over there in Britain. At least I thought they would have a different name for them.

It’s such a pretty little composter!

Yeah, recycling, when it isn’t pushed on you like some sorta green totalitarian dictat isn’t so bad.

Say, do you have any extra ass porn lying around? I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.

I’m one of the last people anyone would mistake for a hippy, but I’m about to google that neat little device and see if I can get one stateside. Now that this city girl lives out in the sticks and has to get her own trash to the dump, there is ample incentive for recycling some of it. Ever since we moved here I’ve been planning a nice big garden, but this year had a baby instead, so the garden had to wait. One exhausting project at a time.

For the record, recycling aluminum cans really is worth it. I had to crunch the numbers for a chemistry class assignment a while back. From what I recall, refining aluminum from bauxite ore accounts for something like a quarter of all the electricity the US uses in a year. Retrieving a given amount of aluminum from cans requires something like 10% of the energy required to refine the same amount from bauxite. So that makes a big difference, big diesel-belching trucks notwithstanding.

When the DSB was living outside of Amish-land in Wilmington, Delaware, we happened upon a farmer’s market, and they were giving away composters. Seems there was some grant, and somebody bought a bunch of them with the grant money, and anybody who wanted one could have one for FREE. I took one, with the best intentions, because I plant a garden every year, but I ended up giving it away to someone who wanted to start a community garden.

Now that’s darn nifty. I recycle as much as I can, but that’s just because my mom raised me not to be wasteful. When I was a kid I took great pride in the fact that we only had two or three bags of garbage a week next to our neighbors’ five or six each. Of course, we didn’t find out about the cost/benefit thing until later, but I still recycle aluminum and glass. The plastic gets recycled just so it doesn’t fill up my trash cans too quickly. Yay for me. I tell you, if I wasn’t in an apartment, I’d get one of those things.

Is it true that all English citizens have the right to a garden?

Shall I mail you my banana peels and half rotted fruit and veg?

Pfft, these eco hippies are idiots. It’s called food and drink. I compost all the critter’s and plant’s leavings, ’cause it’s good food for next year’s crops and critters.

On the other hand I picked my ladyfriend’s olives. Stop that, she’s got some olive trees. 2 quarts of Olive oil we did.

My parents have had one next to their house for years. Never used it, it’s jst BEEN there…….

Hmm, given that a well-known method of kick-starting your compost is to get your chap to contribute, err, ‘man-water’ to it from time to time, it looks like they’ve missed a design trick somewhere in making it so tall….

🙂

You’re absolutely right about aluminum, Mrs P. (Or aluminimumnium, as they call it here). That’s why there’s been aluminum recycling programs since forever.

That’s sort of the test. If a recycling program existed long before stupid hippies monopolized the conversation, then it’s cost-effective. If a thing is good business sense, good businessmen will do it without prodding, neh? If it isn’t good business sense, that’s de facto proof that it’s difficult (meaning expensive, meaning wasteful of resources).

It can’t be an absolute right, Joanna. Most places have allotments — small airable patches of land — on the outskirts of town for the benefit of city dwellers, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get one. Not enough to go around. And councils are forever stirring people up by threatening to do something else with that land.

Heh. The Daily Mail says this guy is making a killing.

I hate myself for reading the Mail.

‘Man-water’? What’s that, beer? Oh…you mean wee-wee. That’s nasty. Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t be overcome with a stepladder.

‘Oh, good morning Mrs. Jones. Just taking a big slash in my compost bin. Awfully brisk today isn’t it? How’s Mr. Jones?’

I’ve got a regular compost bin and worm compost bin. Oh, and a black bin full of rotting leaves. I like the idea of the Johanna, but the whole thing smacks of the council using taxpayer money to foist their green agenda, which sticks in my craw as Americans say.

Oh, yeah. It’s definitely the council using other people’s money to subsidise an agenda. And to justify every-other-week garbage pickup, more to the point. But, hey, we really were going to buy one of these anyway.

Every penny we can screw out of those bastiches…

I “revise” for my exams, I go on “holiday,” I end my sentences with “full stops,” I tell people happy Guy Fawkes day, I describe my Great Books project as similar to “reading Classics at Oxford,” I giggle when someone says “fanny pack,” and I might even occasionally put “petrol” in my car, but I will never, ever, EVAH make my spaceships out of “al-yoo-min-ee-um.” This far, and no farther!!

I want one of those, too! I’m going to see about that.

With regard to alumimum recycling, yes, the energy part of it makes sense. But do you know where most of those cans and such are going for recycling?

China. They gotta put something in those shipping containers that go back across that pond once they’ve dropped off tons of prawn crackers, bamboo calendars and such that they’ve shipped to the US. Theoretically, they could end up with all of our al-you-minnie-um.

I know this cuz I dated a perfesser once who was writing a big ole paper about it.

That’s where much of British unrecyclables go, we’ve been told: landfills in China. For ‘recycling’, Ha Ha. So, even if the hippies were right about the negative environmental impact of mere garbage, all they’re doing with it is sending it to someone else’s place to pollute.

Hippies. They’re only cute when they’re very young.

…But you make me want a composter, too, Weaz.

Just because…

The stupid hippies in the gov’t here apparently haven’t heard about the composters the stupid hippies in the gov’t over there are subsidizing, or they’d surely be doing it here too. As a citizen, I’m glad, but as a consumer who’d just as soon not pay $300 for one, well, darn.

Your composter will compost BONES?! WTF?! I was told when I set mine up to not put meat, bones, or dairy products in mine.

I drink enough coffee to fill mine with the grounds, anyway…

I wonder if they’ll sell you as many as you can buy, and you can sell them to us Amurricans for cost plus shipping plus, I dunno, ten bucks or so…

How in the dickens does it digest bones? I’ve done raw fish wastes pretty easily in a buried compost pit, but those are small and very eager to rot, unlike cooked beef or chicken bones.

No idea. I’ll let you know. We just got the invoice, so Johanna can’t be far behind.

I tried to make one of these work for a year and a half. Sold it to a hippie at work for more than I paid for it. So, all in all, a success!