03211 Design a materials’ cycling process for your household

Observe.

Carefully watch the use of resources in your household systems: —

• Where does your stuff come from?
• What you do with it?
• Where does it go when you finish with it?
• How much trash do you dispose of each week?
• What materials do you cycle (recycle bin, compost, repurpose, make-over, etc.)? In what quantities?

How can you cycle those resources in your life and community to meet the needs of your life and its many different elements and the life of your community in all of its complexities.

You need to know what quantities of materials and resources your life requires. Where do these items come from and what happens after you are finished with them? Does someone use them again? If not, what happens to them? What connections are present with other aspects of your life?

How much trash is produced on your behalf by organizations you belong to and businesses you patronize?

Who does this work of materials cycling? One person by himself or herself? The whole household? Rotating jobs?

Save your receipts and look at them. Examine your trash. How many cubic feet of trash do you dispose of every week?

Study and Evaluate.

What energy and resource sinks swallow the resources from your household food systems? How do they operate? This may be a complicated question and accurate answers may be elusive. Persistence is worth it, however, because knowing how something works can give us clues as to how we can modify/redirect the process to produce less waste.

What plans, processes, equipment, or whatever would make it easier for you and your household to recycle materials?

What efficiencies can be gained by better design? How can you reduce the conversion of useful items into trash? Reduction in demand is always the first step in cycling of your resources.

Can you account for everything — “all the stuff incoming” and “all the trash outgoing”? If not, how close can you get?

Design.

Make your design decisions based on your observation, study, and evaluation.

What systems or structures do you need to put in place to cycle the resources in your life? Do you need a set of bins for the various kinds of recyclable items? What do these bins look like? Where do the bins go? How big are they? They need to be as big as necessary to hold what you accumulate between pick-ups/emptying's of the cycling containers.

Where? When? What? How? How much?

What can you do to influence the organizations and businesses in your life to increase their cycling of material resources?

Stage your decisions.

What comes first? Middle? Last? Never mind the fact that this is a small design, put first things first and second things second and third things third, so you get a feeling of what it is like to organize a set of tasks such as this.

Budget.

If any of this will cost money, get some estimates and develop a budget. Decide on a source of funds.

Write the report.

Write the report and add it to your lifestyle plan.