I've been obsessed with simple ways to transform used waste and aluminum cans into useful things for nearly a decade now, ever since a trip to Mt. Everest Base camp working on sustainability issues with Dr. Alton Byers, the incredible director of Science and Research at The Mountain Institute, when Alton took a picture of me standing knee deep in a garbage pit filled with discarded aluminum high in the Himalayas that nobody felt worth hauling down to Khatmandu for recycling, despite the value of and ease of aluminum transformation.
Alton explains the problem of trash on the trails leading up to Everest in this great article (with great pictures of him too standing in a sea of unnecessarily discarded aluminum cans)
https://www.livescience.com/63061-how-much-trash-mount-everest.html
We were on an National Geographic expedition to look at conservation strategies for the delicate alpine ecosystem and saw many examples of great renewable energy practices:
We learned that many of the solutions to the so-called "waste problem" were all already there, but poorly implemented, communicated and deployed, particularly by Western tourists who seem to turn a blind eye toward their own responsibilities and somehow refuse to "#TakecareofyourownS#!t"!.
For example, on the Khumbu trail the Nepali Sherpa people have had a long standing tradition of using compost toilets to derive nutritious fertile soil for their potato fields and to help heat the house with the heat generated from the thermophilic pile, but that on the Hinku trail in many Rai villages nobody used composting toilets (they use pit latrines) and so fecal material was contaminating the river.
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| Composting toilets in Nepal are so hot that they are used to heat dwellings and occasionally we would stop and stick our hands in the composted poop and rhododendron leaf piles to warm them up! |
We also learned that the trekker population of foreign tourists and the agencies running the tours seemed to have no idea about the Khumbu local tradition of using composting toilets and that Everest trails were inundated with fecal contamination.
As a compost toilet builder for several decades (in my apartment in Los Angeles and all over the world) I was stunned to find that a practice so well known in the villages along the Khumbu trail was never transmitted to or picked up by the foreigners or by the villagers of the Hinku, despite constant communication about other issues and constant visits and constant complaining about the fecal contamination issue. It appeared that most people are so fecophobic they can't wrap their minds around how easy it is to turn human "waste" into human value!
It also stunned me that there was so little conversation about the simple ways to turn "aluminum waste" into metal value.
During my visits I was able to install solar hot water systems and photovoltaic systems and wind systems that we brought with us, and I gave workshops on biogas and compost toilets and ways to derive energy from aluminum cans, but until this day the penetration of these ideas has been lamentably slow for what I can only determine are deep seated cultural issues, both among westerners and easterners. For those of us who are circular economy zero waste practitioners who have eliminated most of our "garbage" it really is disturbing, because none of this is rocket science.
My quest to eliminate all waste at the home and community scale began to get attention and support a decade ago from the National Geographic Society:
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2009/10/01/national-geographics-energy-man/
Throughout the decade I've been blessed with the opportunity to share many of my adventures in zero waste living. One thing I was able to demonstrate in Nepal during my second National Geographic Expedition to the Everest region was how to make a flashlight powered by aluminum can waste using a joule thief circuit:
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2011/06/20/how-aluminum-cans-can-power-a-village/
https://phys.org/news/2011-06-joule-thief-cans-battery-power.html
The video we took in Nepal using the flashlight (the Culhane aluminum "tab torch" ) is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMh1WLDwNbg
To get to a zero waste future all we really need is to get the word out of how easy it is (which we thank National Geographic and Coors for helping us do on their website) and then get students all over the world to simply do it so a new generation graduates with the LIFE TESTED knowledge that, "YES WE CAN"... particularly when it comes to aluminum cans!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/06/sponsor-content-coors-light/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/sponsor-content-coors-light-3/
To do just that, at the Rosebud Continuum Sustainability Education Center, we have recently been turning our LDPE and Polystyrene "waste" into oil with our BLEST Plastic-to-oil machine, and melting our aluminum cans and turning them into ingots and objects and, most recently, using our new student and teacher assembled X-Carve Robotic CNC Router, recycled aluminum and HDPE plastic signs for our exhibits.
Why waste it?
With our students LIFE TESTING these solutions, we hope now to transmit this knowledge to everyone we can around the world. The Hinku and Khumbu trails could certainly use signage for conservation in addition to more natural fertilizer and heat and clean energy that all can be derived from what is now being wasted. We can do this.
No one has to, and everyone CAN eliminate the waste. All of it.
#TakecareofyourownS#!t!
