Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with recycle

• 27 February 2014 - Bolivian Story: Crisil

  We decided to visit Bolivia’s largest glass factory that uses only recycled glass to produce some of their wonderfully organically shaped round glasses like the ones shown in the below photos.

  

  We were in for a very warm welcome and tour thanks to Marcelo who, along with his father and brother, run the factory in Cochabamba. Actually, it was his father who founded the Fair Trade business in 1993. After having a small workshop transforming plastic, someone suggested he could easily do glass instead and at the time the Dutch government was offering funding… and so it was born! Now they have around 100 employees who do shift work during night and day. The factory operates 24 hours because of the amount of natural gas needed to get the ovens to 1300degC.

  

  Marcelo explained to us that they have 5 maestros who blow the glass, so every single item is … Read the rest

• 14 November 2011 - Talking rubbish – Turning trash into treasure

  Here at Bustan Qaraaqa they don’t simply sort their recycling, compost their vegetable scraps and put out the rubbish to be collected weekly – they take REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE to a whole new level. With no municipal waste management in Palestine, they have adopted a policy of ‘what comes on site, stays on site’, often collecting other peoples waste too! Using permaculture, creativity, knowledge and passion they educate and demonstrate by living sustainably themselves and maintaining a philosophy that there is no such thing as waste – just a failure of imagination. They hope to inspire Palestinians to stop throwing their rubbish down hillsides or burning it on the side of the road and for foreign guests to understand their role in the waste cycle too. What would you do if your council didn’t collect your waste? How would you consume differently? What would you do with … Read the rest

• 4 November 2011 - How to recycle a pallet into an… armchair… and more!

  We are always thinking of ways to reduce, reuse and recycle so recently, when I realised how common it is to see wood pallets thrown out in nature, on the side of roads, parking lots or junkyards, I thought ‘what can I do with those?’

  The good news is that with a bit of imagination and some DIY, there is a lot of potential in these seemingly useless wood stocks… I recently made this garden armchair from a pallet found in a street near where we are staying in Palestine!

  

  I know it’s far from perfect, but hey, it’s only my first attempt! 🙂 Here’s how I did it.

  How to upcycle a wood pallet into a garden armchair

  1) Find and prepare a wood pallet

  First you need to find a suitable pallet…. so, how do you choose your wooden pallet? Well, regulations require pallet manufacturers in different countries … Read the rest