waste-recycling / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Though we all diligently cart our plastic to the curb for recycling, the sad reality is that only about 7% of it is commercially viable for recycling, the rest ends up as landfill. Plastic is a petroleum product that until now has been very inconsistent and unstable when returned to an oil form. Recently a North Americ...

Curbside pickup of garbage, compost and recycling: To facilitate recycling and waste management, first determine just what services are available in your municipality so you can sort your waste properly. Not all collection and disposal services are the same in all regions - recycling, compost collection, toxic waste de...

Spending more time at home in the last few months since Covid-19 redefined our reality has presented many with an opportunity to clean, rearrange furniture and make lifestyle modifications. One thing we noticed at home was that some of the items that found their way into our recycle bin, or worse, the trash bin, really...

When buildings are decommissioned there can be a lot of valuable materials that could be used again, but when buyers can’t find sellers, otherwise usable materials are being sent to a land fill. There is a growing amount of used building materials that can be found at online classified websites such as Craigslist and K...

Do Tru-Earth Eco-Strips laundry detergent actually get clothes clean? Any new product such as this can be met instantly with skepticism, or at least perhaps ‘curiosity’ as to whether they will work as well as claimed. So the first question – Do Tru Earth laundry detergent strips actually work? We tried these laundry st...

Should I Renovate, Remodel or Rebuild? This very question comes up a lot for me during site consultations with clients. Some people buy an old home, maybe inherit an old home, or are just tired of living in an old home and aren’t sure of the best course of action. We toil over the same decision with old cars; sometimes...

The best way to reduce waste is to plan ahead to keep it at a minimum; here are some suggestions on how you can do that: Design your house with reduced waste in mind by keeping the plans at sensible dimensions. If you plan lengths to be 4 and 8 foot increments instead of 5 and 9, this makes the best use of industry st...

What is gray water? Or indeed grey water! The term “gray water” refers to all domestic waste water that is drained from sinks, showers, bathtubs and washing machines. While gray water can be reused, water from kitchen sinks or dishwashers is generally not recycled as it contains substantial amounts of grease and organi...

Garbage is a major contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions heating up the atmosphere and causing climate chaos. People generate over 3.5 million tons of solid waste every day worldwide, and the United States tops the list of trash-producing countries. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. citizens ...

At last, a packaged solution for gray water treatment & recycling - the Hydraloop Reducing home water consumption is an increasingly important issue, as the world is already facing a global water shortage crisis. We don’t think much about it in Canada & America because most of us have yet to suffer the extreme ...

The Eco Bath concept is simple: use the waste water from the sink to flush the adjoining toilet. The execution is nothing less than stylish. Though compact, the Eco Bath’s water tank is comprised of two compartments, one that holds drainage water from the adjoining sink and one that contains fresh water in case the nee...