zerowaste

My SO's company handles food. Sometimes that food goes bad. In this case, they got a whole shipment of milk days away from its expiration date (at which point they can't serve it, and local food pantries very sensibly won't accept it). Luckily, they're not committed to dumping it down the drain, and they'll let us take it.

Sometimes it's still okay to drink, but usually we take it so we can make farmer's cheese. This is a soft, mild cheese which makes an awesome dip/spread, or which is useful as an ingredient in other foods. It's super easy, and requires no aging, just heat and vinegar. This was our biggest batch yet.

We normally use this recipe: https://www.olgainthekitchen.com/homemade-farmers-cheese/ though we add additional seasonings depending on how we plan to use the cheese.

Step one is to bring the milk up to temp. The recipe will have more details, but the important thing is to stir it to keep the milk from burning and not to bring it all the way to a boil. We wait until there's a sort of bubble froth along the edge of the pot.

Once it's hot, its time to mix in the vinegar. You want 1/2 cup of vinegar per gallon of milk. Stir it and you'll immediately see the milk separate into clumpy white curds, and the thin yellow whey. If it doesn't separate, hey just add more vinegar.

Strain it through a siev or cheesecloth. You can speed things up by squeezing it a bit, but be careful since it'll be hot.

Let it drain a bit and you've got farmer's cheese. You have tons of options from here. You can keep draining it in the fridge if you want it kinda crumbly, or you can run it through the food processor with a bunch of seasonings to make a nice smooth, spreadable dip. We have a cheap jalapeno cilantro mix we really like for making a dip for crackers. You can also use it as a filling for stuffed shells, or mix it into a white sauce for pasta.

Alternatively, leave it unseasoned and use it to make syrniki, a kind of traditional Russian cheese pancake which is really good. (I've posted about this previously here: https://imgur.com/a/vqk4r4B and the recipe is here: https://www.alyonascooking.com/syrniki-recipe-cheese-pancakes/ )

Like I said, this is our biggest batch yet. Five and a half gallons of milk condensed down to one large bag of cheese. Our plan is to portion off enough for any meals that'll use it this week, and then to freeze the rest.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6224624

If you incorporate these ingredients in your cooking, your left-overs will last longer:

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar (only in high amounts according to feedback; small amounts shortens the life)
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• mustard
• cumin

From other articles:

• black pepper
• mustard seed
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves

Acids mentioned by others:

• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

Lots of potatoes, some bell peppers, strawberries, a leek, tomatoes, 3 apples (1 not pictured), and 1 apex predator. This food will give us apple pie, grits and curry with the tomatoes, stir fried peppers, strawberries in oatmeal, leak soup, and a bunch of meals from the potatoes.

If you're interested in trying this yourself, the easiest place to start is by asking grocery store workers if they throw out any food, and if you can look through it. Some stores will be happy for you to do so. There are even some people out there on an exclusively freegan diet.

Over the counter remedies are costly in Europe (€9 for a bottle of cough syrup). And like prescription drugs, they just slap an arbitrary expiration date on the pkg.

My bottle of cough syrup which expired Dec.2019¹ is nearly empty. I took a risk and took swigs from it over the past few days. No issues. Potency was likely reduced but it wasn’t useless - coughing frequency cut down noticeably for a brief period.

I did everything wrong and got away with it. It’s dicey that it’s in liquid form (which ages quicker than meds in solid forms). I also stored it in a room that gets quite warm in the summer. I always drank straight from the bottle.

Research

It’s interesting to note that the US military doesn’t want to stock up on meds and throw them away upon expiry. It would be a huge cost waste impacting public money. So the “Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP)” was undertaken by the FDA for the Department of Defense. The findings go as far as to test drugs that are 28—40 years past expiry:

• Based on stability data, expiration dates on 88% of the lots were extended beyond their original expiration date for an average of 66 months. Of these, roughly 12% more lots remained stable for at least 4 years after the expiration date. Of these 2652 lots, only 18% were terminated due to failure.

A lot of the advice is what you would expect.. vaccines and biological meds don’t hold up. Anything that’s crumbled and stinky is toast. Perhaps not so obvious: some anti-biotics can become dangerous.

Freezing cough syrup is a bad idea but refrigeration is sensible.

1. The Dec.2019 is technically irrelevant the moment the bottle is opened. Manufacturers only guarantee expiration dates on unopened packages.

It is now mandatory but lots of people still don't have access to a collect point. Some progress have been made in 2023 but it is far from being enough for the whole population to start separating compostables.

For most people around me there is no difference in the way they handle their waste and many are not even aware of this regulation.

As I entered a building supply store someone was smashing all the ceramic tiles that were on the wall. He was about ¾ through them all. I said: hold on.. I’ll take those sample tiles that are still on the wall. I can find a purpose for them even if each one is a different color. He said he could not justify to his boss giving them away and that he would get in trouble. He asked if I wanted to buy them. But a mixed bag of random tiles is worth close to zero to me without having a project in mind. Of course the problem is the business makes nothing off them if they give them away and they risk losing a sale if someone does a project with them that otherwise would require a purchase.

The bizarre thing is this happens every year because (like clothing) the tiles go out of fashion annually. Most are solid colors so hard to get my head around how a solid color tile would go out of style so quickly especially when a vast majority of them are very neutral colors (which are quite forgettable). Who walks into your kitchen and says “dude, you’re out of fashion.. those tiles are over 1 year old?”

Along the same lines, Amazon destroys copious amounts of goods that are still new in packaging instead of selling them to an overstock specialist or donating to charity. An Amazon insider told me it’s because the warehouse space is limited and they prioritize whatever stock moves the fastest. So the slower moving stock gets destroyed just because of a space issue. They told me management is very strict about who has access to the area where these products get staged for disposal. They make sure to select someone who will follow through and won’t take the stuff home or give it to someone who will put it on eBay (they don’t want to compete for sales with a competitor selling their own dumped stock).

That’s like reason# 50 why I boycott Amazon.

This is probably the best use of Christmas trees (though it’s up for debate whether it’s a good idea to cut down spruce trees to begin with).

Side note: it was hard to find this story on a website that’s not exclusive access or enshitified. Even the company who built the turbine (#Modvion) has a tor-hostile website themselves.

According to the BBC Newsroom they use glue instead of bolts to hold it together.

I love wrapping Christmas presents. But I haven't bought wrapping paper in over a decade. Even before I found zerowaste as a concept, I enjoyed the thrift and challenge of reusing old paper, working around tears, tape, and crinkles. I've always been kinda weird so my family went along with it, until it's now part of our tradition and they help me gather up the big scraps after everything's been opened.

My advice, if you want to try this:

• Tape the paper to the present first so you can sort of cinch the paper tight. That pulls a lot of the wrinkles and folds out of it and makes it look nice.

• Fold it at the corners for a sharper look.

• Use the gift/name tags to cover any damaged spots. I use the ones charities send in the mail after you donate once five years ago. Or blank bits of the sticky paper from the sheets of mailing labels.

• Consider other sources of paper - I've also used posters that didn't print right and regular newspaper

Benefits/reasons my family puts up with it:

• It can be surprisingly nostalgic to see paper from last year and remember projects and things we gave back then. I've kept some pieces going, showing up again and again in smaller pieces for like five years now.

• Fancy paper: I try to prioritize the really fancy/pretty stuff from years past, the shiny foil papers etc. it's nice to get extra use out of that.

• Humor: most of us live separately now so everyone tends to wrap their presents with their own paper, which kinda indicates who it's from. Except me - my presents look like they came from everyone else, which is sometimes surprising or funny.

Fish skin is being sterilized and used for skin grafts on burn victims in #Brazil and #Colombia (on both human and non-human animals). It’s superior to gauze and ointment. IIRC, pig skin was used at one point. Apparently fish skin is better at sealing moisture in?

Anyone taking bets on whether folks in the Goth scene will start grafting fish scales on for fashion?

This BBC episode covers it (among other unrelated topics):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4wkk

This (⚠enshitified) ABC News article covers how the fish skin is used on wildlife rescues:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fish-skin-heal-burn-wounds-work/story?id=57122126

^ ⚠warning: that shitty website plays videos automatically, thus drains bandwidth for those on limited connections. (And wtf.. why isn’t there a conventional way to tag such URLs to spare us from verbosity?)

My mother-in-law made these from her mother's bottle collection. The bottles were found near old cellar holes- they were discarded by the people who used to live there. We think they're somewhere around one hundred years old. Cleaned up, they make a beautiful display for plant cuttings!

This is a quick one, not an impressive repair, but maybe a nice demonstration of the perks of keeping stuff until its useful. I found a multi-socket extension cord/usb charger while digging through ewaste (I fix up laptops and give the stuff I find away on my local.Buy Nothing -type group).

Someone had really yanked on it (probably the plug was stuck behind something heavy) and when it came free, two of the prongs were bent, and the ground prong was ripped out altogether.

I had a spare 120v plug - about a year ago, I took some old extension cords from an estate cleanout. Awhile later, while helping a friend build an arcade cabinet, I dug one out and cut the socket off it to wire the cabinet up for electricity. Unfortunately, the sheathing around the individual wires inside the cord had crumbled away to almost nothing, and it wasn't safe to use. I gave the copper to a friend who sells metal to a junkyard, and kept the plugs from either end.

The actual rewiring isn't difficult, just stripped the wires and attached them to the correct terminals. I used an old neon tester my neighbor gave me to check my work. It lit up just fine and I didn't trip the circuit. Later I plugged a bricked, ewaste 1st gen ipad into the usb socket and it started charging just fine. So it looks like this worked out

So there's my excuse for why I keep all these odds and ends.Even when it's something as simple as this, there's something wonderful about being able to take multiple pieces of junk, combining them, and suddenly having a useful item.

I saw a street market vendor with a pile of ~20 or so old TomToms. The price: 50¢ each, must buy in multiples of 2.

I would have loved to be able to flash them with some OSM-based app, but it does not exist AFAIK. It’s half-tempting to buy some if I see that vendor return because it could be fun to have some of the world’s smallest spinning patter hard drives. Indeed, if you open up an old #TomTom there are CompactFlash sized hard drives with tiny spinning platters which use a CF card interface. Probably of no practical use.

IMO, in a forward-thinking world TomTom would be forced to finance porting OSM to those obsolete devices. TomTom’s excuse for obsolescence is that their maps have outgrown the storage media capacity.

I’ve been kicked out of local junkyards ½ dozen times or so now. It’s a tricky game of trying to reach the waste pile when no one is looking, and also seeing who is on duty in hopes of at least ensuring that the same person doesn’t experience the pattern of kicking you out multiple times. Perhaps they would get aggressive and even block you from dumping stuff if you’re kicked out too much.

Strictly speaking, it’s theft to take stuff from the junkyard. To be clear, the junkyards in my area do not sell parts. They just melt and refine the waste. The melt value is naturally less than the as-is value to someone who would repair or reuse.

IMO, the #rightToRepair movement needs to expand to give the public access to junk before it’s recycled or dumped into landfills.

Meds often expire long before they actually decay. There are a variety of reasons for this:

• the drug makers want waste; just like printer ink makers they want to sell you more than you need in part by encouraging waste.
• performing rigorous tests on the rate of decay of drugs to get an accurate expiry date is costly. It’s much cheaper to skip the testing and choose an arbitrary date that is obviously safe. The excessively big safety factor that results supports the 1st point.
• liability for overestimating the expiry is costly.

So I rarely use even ½ a prescription following an incident. But then I’ll often take expired drugs knowing that the expiry date is often arbitrary anyway. Many drugs do not become more dangerous past the date; they just lose potency and need more of a dose (depending on the drug). Anyway, I digress.

The main problem is the excessive controls. You can’t openly resell what you don’t use. Pharmacies don’t want it back and you’re stuck with it.

India has started a “shared doctor appointment” scheme. The idea is that if you have a dozen people with the same medical condition and the doc’s time is limited, they have introduced an option to have everyone meet at the same time to learn about their condition, almost like taking a class. Some patients then establish friendships with other patients with the same condition. Well why not share the meds considering these patients would often have the same prescription?

This one is nothing fancy, but it fit our workflow well. My SO has always saved recipes to a pinterest board - normally she brings a laptop to the kitchen and sets it up on a chair.

We finally took this tablet (came from corporate ewaste) and stuck it to the wall. It's too old for most apps but it seems to work well for this. We installed pinterest, and a podcast player. Eventually I'll check if there's a good replacement OS for the expired android version, but I figure we'll do a bit of a trial run, see how it's working for us and what we need, before starting with that.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3586855

Parts used:

• Raspberry Pi 3b, found in an ewaste bin
• Secondhand microphone
• Leftover arcade button
• Old computer wiring
• Old computer speaker
• Secondhand extension cord
• Wood screws from an estate cleanout
• Board from Everything is Free (used to be a floorboard in an attic)
• Plywood speaker grille cut by my spouse at the makerspace - the only new material
• Python code and tutorials from the internet

After working on a bicycle or an engine, hands covered in grease, I can confirm that coffee does the job. Spent coffee grounds are gritty like sand so they work amazingly well to get the grease off. I use a bar of soap at the same time which causes coffee grounds to get embedded in the bar. It’s a good thing too because it always helps to have the soap bar a bit gritty.

That much is proven for me.. been using coffee for years to wash greasy hands instead of buying the special purpose heavy-duty hand cleaners.

Coffee is now being used to make clothing and one of the claims is that it gives odor control. I’ve cut back to showering once per WEEK (a pandemic side-effect that became a habit). Even though I’m back to leaving the house regularly the shower habit did not change. So my armpits get quite rank after a week. 💡 If coffee grounds have a deodorizing effect, why not use them on arm pits? I’ve not heard of anyone doing this but thought it’d be worth a test.

So I brought spent coffee grounds into the shower and after one scrubbing with them my armpit odor was gone. Coffee grounds work better than shower gel. Normally I scrub with shower gel, rinse, & sniff. The first iteration is usually not enough.. I have to repeat that process 2 or 3 times with shower gel to get the stink off. Coffee grounds worked on just one iteration. I think what happens is the deodorant is sticky & waxy which then gets coated with sweat then the sweat-loving bacteria. The abrasive grit from the coffee grounds scrapes the sticky waxy nasties away faster than soap can dissolve it.

Coffee seems to work on its own but I only did this experiment once so far so I followed with shower gel anyway for good measure.

(stop reading at this point)

nsfw begin

Of course arm pits aren’t the only area that stinks after a week. The groin doesn’t smell too good either. What develops to maturity is what’s called cock cheese¹. I’m not flexible enough to do a proper scientific test. The nose-crotch proximity is what it is. It stunk before the coffee treatment but not after. So it worked at least to the extent that I could confirm. I guess my next partner will have the noble scientific task of assisting with the close proximity sniff test mid-shower and indicate whether shower gel is still needed.

footnotes:

1. Sorry folks. Indeed it’s not the most elegant nomenclature. IMO there’s a language deficiency here. That’s the only name the stuff has AFAIK. Be sure to forget that term whenever you’re eating cheese. Or alternatively it may not be a bad idea to just cut cheese out of your diet at this point.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You were warned.

nsfw end

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3036509

There is apparently a printer that can use spent coffee or tea leaves to print. I love this idea but I would not buy a printer when so many are being thrown away. I pull them out of dumpsters with intent to repair them. So the question is, can they be hacked to work with coffee or tea?

Canon actually disclosed how to hack their cartridges as a consequence of a semiconductor shortage due to coronavirus. So this suggests #Canon could be a candidate for this hack. Has anyone tried it? How precisely do we have to match the viscosity of homemade ink to the original ink?

I think I need a sewing machine that can do a variety of different kinds of stitches. One use case is to repair holey socks by cannabalizing fabric from other holey socks. Thus the stitch needs to be the kind that can stretch and ideally not create an awkward feeling on the foot.

Some sewing machines have a fixed number of stitches they can do. Would it make sense to get an embroidery machine and use #inkStitch (an Inkscape variant)? I’m not sure if that’s strictly for embroidery -- or does that give the ability to do a variety of stitches using FOSS?

The inkstitch.org website steers people toward taking a basic sewing machine and modifying it using 3d printed parts. That’s too ambitious for me. I don’t want a hardware project. I just want to buy hardware that’s ready to go and use free software to control it. Is that possible with things that exist already?

#askFedi

This table was in pretty rough shape, the top was missing, the varnish was flaking, and the wood had greyed in the weather. There was some discoloration I suspected was mold.

I had a scrap of particleboard left over from an arcade cabinet I helped a friend build, which happened to be a good fit for the top, so I decided to combine the two and put them up on my local Buy Nothing -type group. I sanded off the finish, posted a picture asking if anyone would like it once I fixed it up and what color they'd like it painted (normally I restain them but I wanted to get this one done quickly to clear space, and I didn't love how the wood looked (it had a lot of those zigzaggy joints they use for cheap lumber).

A couple people were interested, one picked white, and I painted it up. The paint is the only reason this isn't a completely zerowaste project. I needed more white paint to get this done, and I was in a hurry so I didn't want to wait for asking around on the group. I felt like it was worth it if it gets the table back into service, and out of my basement.

I laid out a dropcloth and set the table upsidedown first so I could get all the spots underneath the joints, then I flipped it and painted it standing upright.

Some of my yellowjacket buddies came to check out what I was doing but we managed to coexist. Nobody got stung and nobody got sprayed with paint.

I turned it four times so I could see how each side looked in direct sunlight, and made sure I hadn't missed anything.

While it dried, I used some white acrylic paint on the sanded edge of the particleboard, to seal up the material. Once that was ready, I flipped the top so the good side faced down, flipped the old table base so it was upside down on top of the upside-down top, measured the distance to each side and adjusted till they were even. Then I drilled through the existing holes in the base, just through the plastic veneer on the particleboard, and drove six drywall screws through.

The finished version is solid enough, and the recipients were happy with it. It'll do it's job for a good many years yet.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/dont-throw-out-those-used-coffee-grounds-use-them-for-3d-printing-instead/

There are bats living around my parent's house. I wanted to build them a house of their own. They seem to like the barn - we think the scratches on the wall below the eaves might be from bats landing and climbing their way up into shelter. They only seem to exist below the eaves, so I'm hoping that's a good sign that they'll notice their new house quickly.

If you've seen my other posts here, you'll know I try to make everything I build out of old materials, stuff I find on trash day, pull from construction debris, or get from my local Everything is Free page, so that was part of the challenge of building this one. I pretty much managed it - the only thing I bought new was the caulking I used to seal the joints, everything else, wood, stains, screws, bituthene, etc was all old stuff.

I started with a kind of motley collection of materials but I like the challenge of finding secondhand stuff that'll work. On the uphand, I didn't have to cut up bigger lumber just to make the spacers, they were all small scraps from other projects. I don't remember where I got the nice piece of half-inch cabinet plywood. The 3/8" plywood came from a fellow I met through Everything is Free, and the pine boards were found on trash day.

I followed this guide: https://www.mass.gov/doc/build-a-four-chamber-bat-house/download from the state of Massachusetts as closely as I could since we're in a similar region, though I had to make it slightly narrower than the specified 17.5 inches because of the dimensions of the 1/2" plywood. I also made the roof slightly wider, because the board was already that length and it seemed like it would offer additional protection, so no need to shorten it.

We had access to a laser cutter through a local makerspace, so my SO and I decided to burn a paisley pattern into the smaller panels just as a quick flourish. I'm actually very pleased with how that little detail looked on the finished version, and it's something I'll play with in future furniture building projects. The sides were slightly longer than the laser cutter's working space, so I had to carve a little of the pattern by hand, but once it was stained they blended in pretty well.

The instructions tell you to cut groves into the interior surfaces to make it easier for the bats to climb. For most of them I did regular horizontal lines, 1/4" to 1/2" apart, but I got bored a couple times and cut climbable murals instead. I tried to emphasize lots of horizontal handholds, and I made sure that each compartment got at least one regular 'ladder' too. Given that they seem to already be climbing the wooden siding of the barn, I think they'll still find this pretty usable.

The instructions all said to stain it with water based stain so the fumes/smell wouldn't bother the bats. I did all the interior surfaces with a can of expresso water-based stain and the outside surfaces with two coats of oil-based stain for improved water resistance (and because I ran out of the water-based stuff). I left all the panels leaning upright on our porch for several weeks so they could offgas with good ventilation, prior to assembly. All the stains came from Everything is Free.

I decided to stain the paisley panels with red mahogany stain and the rest with two coats of ebony to give them a little more contrast. This left the roof and front stained black for maximum sun-warming. On the front paisley panel, which had a frame around the pattern, I did my best to do the inside in red and the frame in black, to match the sides. It was all pretty much hidden by the very distinct grain that piece of plywood happened to have. A prestain might have helped, though I mostly wish I'd had more of the cabinet plywood I used for the upper front and back.

I started assembly by attaching the back to the sides, and started that by caulking the joint. The silicone caulking was the only thing I bought new for this project. I could probably have kept asking around until I found some, but I settled for giving the rest of the tube away on Everything is Free because I didn't think I'd use it for anything before it expired. The directions emphasized that you really want a good seal everywhere except the specified vents, because the bats need to be warm and dry, so I made sure to seal all the exterior joints well.

Once it was all assembled, I added a coat of oil-based urethane to the top and sides of the roof to help with water resistance. If it warped, that could allow drafts and additional moisture intrusion. I also added little bits of trim to the sides under the roof, after sealing that joint a second time.

We hung it partly using some metal strips my dad had from past projects, for attaching chimneys to the roofing around them. They were galvanized and a kind of corrugated pattern. I found two sets of two where the existing holes lined up, and drilled two new ones in each set so they all had four. Then I painted them and attached them to the back.

Another relative provided a scrap of bituthene which we stuck/stapled to the roof for additional waterproofing.

Once it was ready, I pushed it to the top of a tall ladder leveled it against the wall, and put two screws through each metal bracket, then two screws through the landing strip at the bottom, and two toenailed in through the vents on the sides. I'm told that was overkill but I really didn't want any bats we housed to fall off the wall someday. At this point, if it goes, it'll take the siding with it.