Hop, skip, jump / from magic to malevolent (2)

The idealistic part of me thinks that one day we'll look back at the end of the 20th century / beginning of the 21st century and ask what on earth were we thinking, generating huge amounts of unnecessary waste.  However, this idealistic part has been meeting the harsh reality of rennovation over the last week.

I'd like to think we're concious rennovators. As we've previously mentioned, we are going to lengths to preserve and salvage and reuse as much as we can. We've made countless trips to the dump with carefully sorted sacks in order to recycle as much as possible. But the waste keeps coming. You may remember from an earlier post just how much waste. Most of it is useless, and when the volumes become so high it becomes a huge, and very costly chore to separate out the different materials. 

That said, in the last post you caught a glimpse of a waste free garden. Here it is in all it's glory.

A garden! A garden! My kingdom for....

And in case you forgot how it was before.

And where did all the rubbish go? Most of it - five tonnes approximately, after salvaging a tonne of whole intact bricks - went here.

Our mixed material skip. Ideally we wanted to separate the different materials. But to do this we would have had to hire one skip of each type, at the same price as a mixed skip! Meaning about 2000 euros instead of 500. How does this make any sense?!

A 15m3 skip ("containeur", great anglicism that). 

How did it get there? A trolley and lots of physical effort from four of us: us two and two of our parents. Hint. If you want to get in shape, don't go to the gym. Just do a house reno. You'll end up in better shape than you can ever imagine.

Yay! It's going away on the skip pick up.

This was part 1 of "taking back control" of our garden. Part 2(a) was removing the asbestos*. So I donned my Darth Vader outfit, soaked everything with water to minimse any airbone asbestos in the case of breakages during removal, and off we went.

"Luke, I am your father."

Two sweaty hours later, we had bagged asbestos.. though this still has to be properly disposed of.

Bagged asbestos.

To finish off last week's trilogy of waste management, we had another metal-selling trip. This incidentally provides an answer to the question "What was that big thing in the hall in the last post?" It was the old boiler from 1969. About 200kg of cast iron, which required 3 of us to get up from the basement on a trolley.

200kg of  boiler. The new one is 35kg. How times change.

The combination of the skip experience and metal did make me think. It's amazing how a financial incentive can make us more diligent in our waste management. Metal regulates itself. But maybe skips need a bit more regulating or incentivising so the massive amount of waste from renovation can be better sorted and reused.

* There is still a part (b) to come