Trash To Treasure Christmas Ornaments

December 8, 2015March 18, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

Every year a few pieces of trash are pulled out of our bin and gleefully turned into ornaments for the tree. Call it a family tradition for waste-minded children. This year, we started with a couple of CDs that I have been meaning to drop off for recycling at Green Disk in Seattle. But then I noticed how shiny the discs are and got an idea.

Shiny CD Ornament

Take some pretty scrap paper (even wrapping paper will do) and have your kids trace a circle around the edges of your CD and then let them cut the CD-sized circle out. Glue the pretty paper to the non-shiny side of your CD, but be sure to glue a little looped ribbon as an ornament hanger at the top. We also glued some tin foil over the hole in the middle so the CD looks like a perfect shiny circle with no hole.

Then, get out your glitter glue or puffy glue and let the kids make designs on the shiny surface. My children love symmetry so they both tried to create symmetrical patterns on 4 sides of the CD.

Done!

Scrap Paper Star Ornament

This one is almost as easy. First, we pulled some paper out of the trash that had printing on one side and white on the other. We threw it in the printer and went to our favorite paper craft site, The Toymaker. This site, created by artist Marilyn, is full of fantastic fold-able paper toys that are perfect for small hands. We’ve made gift bags, small puppet theaters, animals, toy airplanes, perfect building blocks, and gift boxes using the beautiful hand-drawn designs on this lovely site. For the 3D star ornament go to the Christmas page and scroll down to the star.

Print out your template for a fold-able star from Marilyn’s downloadable PDF file. Her templates are all free and very easy to understand.

Next, cut out strips of scrap paper! We used colorful tissue paper we got from a freecycler so that we could still see the PDF template through the tissue.

Glue your tissue to the star in any design you’d like. Simply cover your PDF printout with colorful paper scraps. Next, cut out your star template.

Start folding along the dotted lines (Marilyn indicates which folds are “mountains” and which are “valleys” and where to put glue.) It’s really easy!

Your finished star took about 15 minutes to make.

What are you making this year for your tree?

8 Onion Skin Reuses

December 7, 2015December 7, 2015 / Liesl Clark / 1 Comment

Onion skins are something our family tends to accumulate a lot of. Since our chickens don’t love them, I thought it might be good to look up some interesting reuses for this everyday kitchen waste. Just like garlic skins, onion skins have some unique uses. They’ve even been touted as the new “superfood!”

After reading this select list, if you’re looking for ways to get your hands on onion skins, just collect them with a few onions at your local store. They’re always in the bin with the onions.

1) Throw them in soups and slow cookers: Over 500,000 tons of onion waste is thrown out each year in the European Union and this bulb, including all its skin, is nutritious! Its full of fiber and phenolic compounds which help to prevent coronary disease.

2) Use skins as a dye for wool.

3) Onion skins are known to help cure leg cramps. Boil the skins in water for 10-20 minutes, making an infusion. Drain the skins from the water and drink it as tea before bed. It might take a week or so to take full effect.

4) Throw them in your compost heap.

5) Onion skins make a great hair dye, turning it a beautiful golden brown. Oh, and did you know onions promote hair growth?

6) Dye your Easter eggs a beautiful purple color with onion skins. This recipe shows you how to make pretty imprints, too.

7) Life Hacker suggests you hold on to the onion skin while chopping onions to protect your fingers from your knife. You have to see the picture to get it. Great hack! Then throw the skins in your freezer jar for future soup stock.

8) Dried and ground onion skin as a replacement (small percentage) for wheat flour ups the antioxidant content in bread! Read about the ground-breaking study and give it a try.

How do you use your onion skins?

Ode to Tall Trees And The Sticks They Produce

September 28, 2012 / Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

Tall Trees, Photo © Liesl Clark

We live out in the sticks — literally. All around us, sticks tend to abound. Our land is a thin strip of a clearing in a second growth fir and cedar forest punctuated by the green canopy of enormous big leaf maples. We’re on a tree-sheltered bluff above Puget Sound where winter winds blow down branches like myriad arm parts of stiff wooden dolls.

Kindling, Photo © Liesl Clark

We pick up the branches all winter long, a resource dropped from above, but readily put to use. Nothing is wasted here. Large pieces are cut into lengths for the fire as we heat our home entirely with wood. Small bits are used as kindling, we even pick up many of the pine cones to use as firestarters and store them in baskets, and the green wood goes in the stick pile, to be temporarily used as shelter for the creatures that live deep inside.

Little Creature Habitat: The Stick Pile, Photo©Liesl Clark

Every property should have a stick pile. It provides safe cover for wild birds and we know a possum or 2 live there. Think Christopher Robin and the little homes his friends had.

Come spring, we always have stick construction to do. Our whole property is outlined with natural fencing to keep deer at bay. The sticks are the mainstay barrier, not a serious one, but a natural barrier that doesn’t set us too far apart from the forest beyond.

Deer-proof fence? Well, sort of. Photo © Liesl Clark

But it’s the vegetable garden that gets all the attention around here. It’s enclosed by a stick structure unmatched, perhaps, on the planet.

The idea started with my son, Finn, who at 4 decided we needed to build a fence for a garden. We designed lengths of fence that went into the ground, pre-built by the 2 of us: Three lengths were horizontally affixed to 2 vertical posts with thin vertical sticks then fixed every foot or so. We built half a garden’s -worth and then took a break, a little discouraged by the huge effort. Then our friend, Ang Temba, arrived from Nepal and recognized the design as one commonly used in rural mountain villages. He finished the project with renewed vigor. The fence is hardware-dependent, 4-inch long screws and a power drill do the job, as well as a post-hole digger to bury the thick posts.

Stick Fence 2.jpg Photo © Liesl Clark

Drilling Stick Fence.jpg Photo © Liesl Clark

Beautiful arched hemlock and cedar branches adorn the uppermost reaches of the fence, some 7-8 feet high, to deter deer from jumping inside.

Arches National Fence, Photo © Liesl Clark

We liked the structure so much that when it came to enclosing our chickens (to protect them from raccoons, bald eagles, and mink) we built a stick fence for them, too. It’s actually an entire timberframe aviary fully enclosed in requisite chicken wire.

Chicks in Sticks, Photo © Liesl Clark

As soon as we finished it, our coop, known as “Chicks in Sticks,” was featured in Bainbridge Island’s first Tour de Coop, surely picked for the whimsical stick-fort-like hideout the feathered girls call home.

The trees must look on with amusement, peering down through their branches at our woven stick world below. Why do we gain such pleasure from making sense of the materials made readily available to us by the wind, the land, and the tall trees above?

The Last Plastic-Free Place on Earth. Well, Almost.

August 6, 2012 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

Riding into the Village of Samdzong, Upper Mustang, Nepal, Photo: Liesl Clark

It was a plastic bag, of all things, that spooked the young Tibetan horse into a bucking frenzy. We had just saddled him up and tied some snacks onto the already-packed saddle bags. Our 9-year-old son, Finn, was his rider. Something about the unfamiliar sound of crinkling plastic set the horse off and 10 seconds later Finn miraculously threw himself from the saddle, landing onto his back. He stood up, immediately, and faced everyone to say, in a shaken voice, “I’m okay.”

Plastic bag caught in a pile of kindling, Tamagaon, Upper Mustang, Photo: Liesl Clark

Ironically, this was the only plastic bag I had accepted from a shop keeper in 10 days and my misjudgement felt like a slap in the face. Plastic bags don’t belong out in the wilds of the Himalayan high steppes — even the 2-year-old gelding knew that.

We were at 13, 300 feet, just outside the royal city of Lo Manthang in the Kingdom of Mustang, Nepal. Finn’s horse galloped away down a rough stretch of canyon, the saddle bags now dangerously tangled between his hind legs. He had ripped himself, twice, from the grips of Tashi Wangyel, his owner, the former horseman of the Raja, or king, of Mustang. Tashi was devastated by the sight of the abrasions across Finn’s back. Finn is like a son to him, a dear friend of his own son, Kunga, who is one of the youngest monks at the nearby monastery. Luckily Tashi had a spare horse Finn could jump on as we had a 5-hour hike ahead of us to the Tibetan borderlands village of Samdzong.

“Dolma,” Reliable Steed, Photo: Liesl Clark

We had 6 days to excavate 6 caves for the remains of a 1600-year-old people who once buried their dead in cliff-side shaft tombs. We also had a waste audit to conduct, researching how a traditional village at the end of the trail handles the influx of modern plastic packaging in many goods that are now available due to the nearby construction of a road from China and Tibet.

The New Way: Traveling by Truck up The Kali Gandaki River. Even 6-Year-Olds are Piled in the Back. Photo: Liesl Clark

The Samdzong people, compared to most villages in Upper Mustang, are relatively untouched by modern amenities often brought in to Mustang to appease the tourists. There’s no shop in Samdzong, indeed few tourists are given permission to visit the forgotten village. We’re helping fund the building of a museum for the ancient artifacts our team of archaeologists and climbers uncovered in the high caves — the attendant grave goods of a Himalayan people we’re only just beginning to flesh out through genetic analysis. The material culture these people had at their fingertips consisted of domestic animals, wood, ceramics, wool, glass beads, and metals like bronze, copper, iron, and other precious metals.

Samdzong Village, Plastic-Free. Photo: Liesl Clark

Little has changed in Samdzong today. The people in this bucolic village work their sheep and yak wool day and night, spinning and weaving to make sweaters, colorful clothing, and even hand-woven woolen boots and shoes that are more prevalent than sneakers.

Samdzong’s Handmade Sustainable Shoes, Discarded in Riverbed. Photo: Liesl Clark

Samdzong Wool Works. Photo: Liesl Clark

For thousands of years, archaeologists have claimed, indigenous cultures discarded their material waste just outside their homes and villages, along slopes outside enclaves where gravity and precipitation would lend their aid in melting ceramics, wood, and textiles back into the Earth. Broken stone tools simply blended back into the landscape that thousands of years later only a trained eye can now identify. These are the clues to the ancients we look for in Upper Mustang, discards flippantly thrown out of cave dwellings or village homes as well as the goods buried with the dead, to accompany them into the next life.

Ancient Bronze Recovered by Finn from Cave Tomb. Photo: Liesl Clark

Fast forward some 1600 years later, and Samdzong’s material culture is still mostly natural: Wood, metals, ceramics, a little glass, and of course textiles. They trade their large flock of goats for food and goods from Southern Nepal and nearby Tibet. A small percentage of what’s carried back to the village is plastic, and the behavior around waste has not changed. All household trash is sent out the door, often into the irrigation ditches only a few feet away so the buoyant plastic can be carried off with the current. The good news is that the plastics are limited to a few things: Ramen noodle packets and clothes washing powder bags from China. The women wash their clothes in the streams and ditches and set the empty bags free with the moving water. I picked up a large plastic feedsack-worth in about 10 minutes of cleaning-up down river.

Samdzong River Plastic, Photo: Liesl Clark

We carried out with us the feed sack of plastic from the Samdzong river with promises to take with us next year’s village plastic if the locals stockpiled it year round. If all visitors to Upper Mustang carried out with them a large sack-full of a village’s compressed lightweight plastic packaging, including water bottles, and took them to Kathmandu to give to the rag pickers who collect and sell them to India for a reasonable price, Upper Mustang might be freed from its choking plastics.

Choked with Trash: Community Garbage Deposited Alongside a Waterfall Outside the Kagbeni Police Post. Photo: Liesl Clark

“We often discover the settlements or mortuary remains of ancient cultures by first finding their trash: Their ceramics, or broken stone tools, even stone flakes from tool-making that were left behind. This is the common waste of early peoples,” explains Dr. Mark Aldenderfer, leading archaeologist in our scientific inquiry about who the first people were to settle and thrive in Upper Mustang.

Almost completely intact skeletal remains of a 1600 year old man from Samdzong Mortuary Caves, (L to R: Nepali Archaeologist, Mohan Singh Lama; Dr. Bruce Gardner, M.D.; Dr. Tina Warinner, Geneticist) Photo: Liesl Clark

Our research is all about early people’s garbage and grave goods. That we’re also committed to addressing the modern garbage of the local culture seems only fitting. We’ve brought Italian metallurgist, Giovanni Massa, with us to study the many metals we’ve uncovered in Samdzong’s caves. Thousands of years from now, when single-use plastics will be a mistake of the past, what will archaeologists make of our own material culture and plastic waste left behind? It will surely still be here, buried under the silt and dust of timeless winds. I image a plastics specialist will be needed to determine which polymers were used, how they could possibly have gotten here, asking why we invented a material that will never fully break down, slowly dissolving into smaller and smaller bits, disseminating into our waters to be taken up into our food chain, inadvertently consumed by creatures great and small.

Prayer Flags in Mustang’s Relentless Wind. Photo: Liesl Clark

The Last Plastic-Free Places on Earth: The Land of Reuse

July 30, 2012September 9, 2012 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

Sometimes you have to travel to the other side of the planet to find reuse inspirations you had never considered before. Following the banks of the Kali Gandaki River, we’ve finally entered the land of reuse, one of the most challenging places to live, yet innovation and creativity with the things one would normally throw away can be seen at every bend in the road.

Reuse, here in remote parts of Nepal, is simply a matter of necessity. Goods that are carried up into the hinterlands are here to stay, forever. There’s no garbage truck to carry off the refuse and little resources available to make and fix things. But the people who live here are incredibly resourceful, repurposing what they have into useful things for the home. For thousands of years, the Himalayan people here, currently the Loba, Thakali, and Magar, have made do with what they have and have reused the items in their lives with fervor. The following images are a few garden and farming reuses we’ve come across in lower Mustang.

Garden and Farm Reuse, Thakali-Style:

Construct a garden fence from scrap wood tied together with elephant grass reeds.

Wood is precious in Mustang so if a fence is needed, scraps are found to create it and lashings are adhered to hold the wood scraps together. These fences are made of sustainable materials.

This Thakali family tied a bamboo fence together with electrical wire

Anything that can hold something is turned into a planter in Mustang. Since the landscape is so harsh, container gardens are very successful here.

Bucket planters are the rage in Mustang

Lettuces and Herbs are Planted in Large Styrofoam Boxes that would Otherwise be Thrown by the Roadside

Some of the most beautiful handmade brooms can be found in Mustang.

Even sticks are repurposed into brooms and garden rakes

The Last Plastic-Free Places on Earth: Zero Waste Traveling

July 22, 2012 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

Packed to the Gills, Ready for Zero Waste Travel

by Liesl Clark

“Our flying time today will be 10 hours 41 minutes.”

We were mentally prepared for the demands on our time for the flight from Seattle to Seoul, but the big surprise was the onslaught of single use plastic. For a family that generates only a garbage can-worth of trash every 4-6 months, consuming that much plastic in a single day hurts to the core. Of course, our carbon footprint for flying to Asia, alone, offsets the year-round effort we’ve made to consume less plastic and generate little waste. But if we didn’t go to Nepal, we wouldn’t be able to search-out the last plastic-free places on Earth. My family and I have spent the last 3 years conducting village waste audits in remote parts of Nepal while also trying to uncover the difficult truths behind the essential ragpickers of Kathmandu.

We’re All “Plassengers” Swimming in Single Use Plastics

We’re trying to acquire as little plastic as possible while traveling and we’re off to a wretched start. Each of the 200 Boeing 777 seats on our plane comes with individually cling-wrapped blankets, and the following reusable items, all in their hermetically sealed plastic bags: head phones, a bathroom kit, toothbrush and slippers. A plastic bottle of water sits on top. That’s a lot of plastic per passenger, and our family’s first big dose of BPA in a long time. The message from the airline is clear: These are reusable items they’ve washed. The plastic wrap should make us feel safe from any germs that might have previously been on these items. And when we’re done with them, they’ll wash them and wrap them in plastic again. On our second flight, we chose to opt out of these items and simply didn’t use them. Reduce, Reuse, Refuse.

Let’s face it, the entire interior of the plane is plastic, which we’re thankful for, as it reduces the plane’s carbon footprint due to its light weight components. Korean Air’s efforts at reduction of carbon emissions are laudable. They even plant forests in Mongolia to offset their carbon emissions.

Plastics Have Helped Airplanes Reduce Weight and Hence their Emissions

The key to zero waste traveling is subterfuge: Bring your own travel kit and you’ll quickly learn the tricks of the waste sleuthing trade. Our simple zero waste travel kit consists of a water bottle, coffee mug and bamboo utensils.

Zero Waste Travel Kit, Sans Reusable Coffee Mug

We’re on our way to Kathmandu, Nepal to lead another expedition to the ancient kingdom of Mustang to search for the earliest evidence of the first people to have come to the Himalaya. We uncovered 3000-year-old human remains last year and hope to learn more about these ancient people by climbing up into the high cave tombs they carved out for their dead and excavate the sites for more bones and material artifacts.

For millenia, humans have traversed the Earth, taking with them their materials and possessions, using them as they needed and discarding of them when done. Until plastic was produced, the material waste early cultures left behind was predominantly ceramics, metals, and glass. We’re taking a journey back in time to those cultures. The people who remain in the villages, presumably their descendants, are relatively untouched, with little influence from cultures reliant on consumable plastics. While plastics are slowly seeping into the villages, a crisis is occurring as the old ways of sustainable disposal meet the new non-degradable and highly toxic-to-burn materials.

Imagine: There’s no municipal recycling in the hinterlands. Everything must be reused, or into a hand-dug hole it goes, the mini landfills just outside each village. But space is running out and with erosion those landfills are shedding their plastics with every monsoon.

As we work with a team of scientists to find ancient material remains, indeed search for the waste left behind by the earliest known people to have come to the Himalaya, we’ll also work directly with the villagers themselves to learn how they handle the influx of cheap Chinese plastics from just over the border while still clinging to their more sustainable ancient traditions. We have much to learn from them, in documenting how they live closely to the Earth and use everything in their lives, repurposing and reinventing new uses for items brought into the household. And they, in turn, have much to learn from us, from our own mistakes in becoming too reliant on unnecessary plastics. Up there, throwing “away” is poignantly never truly away and those plastics that make their way up to the top of the world are here to stay forever, flowing ever so slowly down the watersheds into our streams, lakes, and rivers to the larger populations below.

Killing Time on a 10 Hour Flight: Craft a Bracelet from Plastic Airline Blanket Wraps

Are there any truly pristine, plastic-free waters on our planet? Precious few is our answer, having worked with scientists studying the toxic deposits from ash and air pollution on the highest glaciers. Burning plastics, among many other pollutants in the air, has contributed to this disturbing trend of high mountain streams, well above populated villages, with detectable levels of pollution.

The best my family and I can do — our little tribe of “Garbage Spies” — is try to address plastic waste wherever humans go, starting with ourselves. Whether we’re in Kathmandu or a tiny village near the Tibetan border, we endeavor to discover the systems in place for reusing, recycling, or disposing of plastics. We determine which plastics are most prevalent and why, and then we talk with community leaders, families, and the children themselves at our little children’s libraries we’ve established, to search out best practices for dealing with plastics and preventing them from getting into the environment. For the next 3 weeks, we’ll send you installments of our story from the Himalayas, the garbage sleuthing done and the lessons learned as we travel further away from the source of plastic outflow to the least likely places it ends up, the places we all thought were immune from modern packaging and single-use convenience.

Koala’s Headband Repurposed from Airline Headphone Plastic Wrap

Please check back with us to follow our story, whether they’re from the highest reaches of our planet or sea level where all things plastic ultimately flow.