Sprig
Does anyone know how / where to recycle / safely dispose of old paint & chemicals, sealants etc. in Cape Town? I use abundance recycling but they don’t take such things….. I’m thinking if I take it with my charity box to Nazareth House they might just chuck in the trash, which is not the point. Help?? (have been googling, only to find “get creative with your old paint and decorate your plant pots” hmmm….)
Marian Park-Ross
Recycling can be a task. You need to separate your waste and haul it off somewhere. Surprisingly, it is more of a task in Cape Town as the Municipality doesn’t offer recycling bags for paper and cardboard or a recycling collection service. Think again! Recycling can be easy!
More than half of humanity now lives in cities, according to the United Nations Population Fund. This rapid and ongoing change presents a raft of new challenges, many of which create opportunities for resourceful entrepreneurs. Here are five concepts that target consumers’ increasing interest in growing their own food in the city:
1. REEL GARDENING — Simplifying the process of starting a domestic garden, South Africa’s Reel Gardening provides a strip of biodegradable paper carrying correctly spaced, pre-fertilised seeds. The strips are colour coded (e.g. red for tomatoes, purple for beetroot) and carry instructions for how deep they should be planted in your soil. Just add water!
2. THE WIKI GARDEN — Urban gardeners who haven’t even got a bed of soil may be interested in the Wiki Garden from Hawaii. It’s a metre-long “growing medium” (i.e. sack) containing compost, worm castings, bat guano and more, plus a built-in irrigation system with a hose attachment. The bags can be connected, allowing for an easily scalable system.
This post is not specifically about gardening but more about the environment and specifically recycling. There is a great company that has recently started operating in Durban called Earth Green Recycling. They offer a service where, for only R50.00 per month, they will come and collect all your recyclables, i.e. paper, plastic, cans and bottles.
They then distribute it to recycling centres saving you the time and effort. They also collect old cooking oil which is converted to biodiesel by Ecologic.
Website: www.earthgreen.co.za