A huge Thank-you to the people who have come forward to be part of a communal rubbish bin roster.

It would be great to have just a few more people - allowing 2 people per shift, and 3 on recycling days - doing the Sunday night and Monday service only once a month, with a few emergency back-up people to cover times when people can’t do their shift.

If you use the communal rubbish bins in the recycling bay, please come forward and offer your support to make this system more do-able for everyone.

I have drafted a roster, and contacts list, which will be emailed out ASAP once all responses are to hand.

Bridget O’D - Ph: 8557 6123 or 0418 892 463 or email

Thank-you to the 5 people who have come forward so far to be part of a solution for our communal bin service via a bin roster.

I need at least 5 more to come forward to make this work - with a system that allows 2 people per shift, doing the Sunday night and Monday service, once a month.

Please come forward and offer your support to make this system sustainable.

Bridget O’D - Ph: 8557 6123 or 0418 892 463 or email

Tess Sapia from the Onkaparinga Council spoke with our group, answered our many questions, facilitated a garbage game, and gave out some stickers and hand outs.
It was an excellent evening, and for those who were unable to attend, I wanted to pass on this information:

Recycling Facts that you might not know -

These can be recycled in our yellow bins -
All hard plastic is now recyclable regardless of the number on the base. Anything that you cannot crush in your hands is accepted including ice cream containers, and yoghurt tubs.

These get reused or go into the red rubbish bin -
Small snap off type yoghurt containers that usually come in packs of 4.
Strawberry & cherry tomato containers, and the inserts of biscuit and cake packets.
Polystyrene trays that often contain meat products.
Did you know that all lids must be removed? This allows the containers to be compressed into a cube for transport; workers at Solo otherwise have to manually remove the lids! These lids need to go in the waste bin, unfortunately they cannot be recycled, the small ring that is left on the neck of the bottle is OK.

These Cannot be put in yellow bins but can be recycled -
Mobile phones, compact fluoro globes, and all batteries can go to the Willunga Environment centre.
All plastic bags cannot go in the yellow bin, but Coles and Woolies will take them.
Aluminium that can be easily crushed such as foil, pie tins, yoghurt lids, takeaway containers and chocolate wrappers cannot be recycled by Solo, so please leave out of the yellow bin. However, Chas M will take them, so collect them and place them in the bin provided in Sue E’s carport or leave with Jacqui G.

It is important to get it right because if the driver notices contamination as s/he tips the load into the truck, a decision is made to take the truck straight to landfill. So we can have an impact on the entire truck load going to the right place! Some of the contamination received includes the following:  food, clothing, basket balls, bags, electrical cords, & hoses, the last two are very hazardous to the recycling plant as they can become caught up in the machinery!
Onkaparinga's contamination rate is 15-24% at present.

Food Waste
Onkaparinga Council sells worm farms and compost bins "at cost" passing on the savings to the consumer, (cheaper than Bunnings) to encourage backyard composting and recycling. The council is very keen to reduce food waste going to landfill; apparently 50% of household waste (in the red bins) is food. (Yes they do bin audits!) If you must throw out food, because it is not suitable for your compost/chooks/wormfarm, it is much better to put it in your green waste bin, as this goes straight to Peats Soils in Willunga to be composted.

Bridget - for WMG

Owing to concerns on the part of some villagers, town supply (mains) water only will be used on all Village orchards.

Only the Farm orchard and woodlot will receive reclaimed water from the WWTP.

We are currently seeking external advice on potential improvements to the WWTP to ensure water can be made reliably suitable for use in the current orchard irrigation systems throughout the Village.

Andy Coe - for WMG

From Toby Good:

The village has quite a number of bins in the recycling compound that are shared by people in the village who choose not to have their own bin.

If you put your rubbish and/or recycling in these bins, please do the right thing and help to take them out to the roadside on a Sunday evening and bring them back on a Monday. (The bins need only go out when they are completely full).

On Sunday just passed, myself and two other villagers, who do not use these bins, put out a total of 20 bins consisting of both general rubbish and recycling and all were chockers! (One wonders where the next week’s rubbish was going to be placed...!) They were taken to the far side of the road (opposite the Village entrance).

Using communal bins is a great idea. However, while we love living and working together in this Village, the Village is an intentional community (we have all chosen to live here), and will only continue to flourish if everyone chips in and does their bit - many hands make light work etc!

Unfortunately, if we assume that someone else will do it, the job, almost always, never gets
done!

Thanks for your help, Toby

***************************
From Bridget O’Donnell:

It’s time to set up a Communal Bin Roster.

Please contact me if you can help and are willing to participate on a volunteer roster, and I will type one up and post it on feed/email it to you.

We need to put out the full rubbish and recycling bins from the recycling area onto the street on a Sunday night and retrieve them on a Monday.

My guesstimate is that we would need 3-4 people each week to make it a quick task. We could set a time each week to meet, and do it together, or just agree to do a certain number of bins each on a certain week.

Please come forward if you are using these communal bins and take part in a communal effort to deal with them. My ears are open to any alternative ideas, I welcome your input.

I just want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the generous actions of Trevor Kingston who dealt with these bins silently, and punctually, for many years, providing a great service for the village.
 
Bridget - 8557 6123 or 0418 892 463 or preferably email

The Hard Rubbish collection is POSTPONED to - Saturday 1st May

Due to a clash with the village Yaccadoodle Fringe Art exhibition, I have organised an alternative Council hard waste collection for Saturday 1st May. (Perhaps not a good look for our waste to be on display to our Fringe visitors!)

The same system will apply as outlined in last Friday’s New Feed, just the date is changed.
See the instructions at:
http://www.aaev.net/news/files/87a70cea60f402bbc1e2715f2a10f3f5-4042.html#unique-entry-id-4042

PLEASE DO NOT put your hard rubbish in the recycling bay in between skip services.

Thanks - Bridget O’D

Recently there has been a substantial amount of building / moving waste blown around the site on windy days - e.g., plastic and polystyrene packaging etc.

While much of it may have come from The Cottages building site, there are things you can do to help us keep down this type of pollution:

• If you are building, make sure you or your builder uses a skip and covers it so that light items cannot blow out;
• If you are moving in, make sure all wrapping and packaging materials are properly disposed of and not left lying around for the wind to catch; and
• If you see rubbish lying around on roadsides, the Farm or other common land, please help us by picking it up and disposing of it securely.

The site maintenance team will be most grateful!

Last Friday, one of the pumps at the Wastewater Treatment Plant failed - at four o’clock in the morning! - resulting in unwelcome nighttime emergency calls to several registered volunteers.

The pump was found to be jammed up with tampon strings - the unravelling of which was a dirty, smelly and tedious job that no volunteer should have had to tackle.

So - to all our Village women - please do not flush sanitary products down the toilet (including the toilet in the Sharing Shed), and please make sure you also pass this instruction on to any female guests in the Village.

John H - for WMG

If you cover up an in-ground communications box when gardening out on to common land, please be aware that you will be responsible for any extra expense incurred in locating it to connect neighbours’ services or find faults.

John Heij and Andy Coe - for Communications Portfolio, WMG

It is time for Neighbourhood Groups to organise bird netting of fruit trees in their orchards.

Almond trees need to be netted as soon as possible. Other fruit trees will need covering over the next couple of months.

Please can Neighbourhood Group leaders let the Village grounds maintenance team know if their group can net the trees, or whether the task will need to be done by the maintenance team.

Contact Tony Gerlach (8556 6783 or 0413 407 150) or Marc Kelly (8556 5555 or 0429 144 304).

The bird netting is stored in two sheds in the Market St. area. Some bundles of netting are labeled with the approximate number of trees covered, and there is also a roll of netting near the Toyota ute. Scissors can be used to cut the bird netting if necessary.

Marc Kelly and Toby Good - for WMG Orchards and Irrigation

Did you know that you can recycle your old glasses?

Your unwanted reading, sight or sunglasses can help improve the eyesight of children and adults all around the world. The simple donation of unwanted glasses can make a huge difference to someone living in less fortunate circumstances.

Drop off your unwanted reading glasses and sunglasses, either broken or intact to any OPSM, Laubman & Pank or Budget Eyewear stores across Australia.

For more information on recycling many other household items see - Amanda Rishworth's recycling information at:
http://www.rishworth.com.au/a/newsletters/GreenNewsletterAugust2009.pdf

We Have a new system for dealing with refund recyclables.

Replacing the old bales we now have 2 wheelie bins with orange lids (see picture)

They will be emptied each week on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

These bins accept anything with a refund - PET and Glass Bottles, Aluminium Cans, and flavoured milk / juice Cartons. (Consider that the iced coffee containers that your builders leave on site are worth 10c to our community, they could go into the collection bins instead of your skip.)

Please take the lids off all bottles.

It is very important to only put refund recyclables  in these bins or we will forfeit the whole bin, ie. they pay us nothing. Please help by checking (is it refundable?) before you throw it in.

So Please no rubbish, cardboard / plastic or recyclables other than refundable containers.
All other recyclables can to go into the yellow top bins.

As a community we all benefit from the funds raised in these bins. For example, today’s delivery of refund recyclables made $53.60 for the Village Savings Fund.

Thanks for your support.

And finally, please don’t leave hard rubbish in the Recycling Bay until it is called for specifically for a hard rubbish collection. The picture below shows some rubbish that someone has dumped in the clean recycling area. If it is yours, please come and take it home. This area is not a dump. Please do not dump your rubbish. If dumping continues I may need to resort to locking the gates.

Bridget O’D - for the Works Maintenance Group

For particular attention by new Lot owners - especially Cottage owners:

There is a lot of mail piling up in the large metal box labelled “173” in front of the Village Noticeboard. Quite a bit of it is for Cottage owners who, as yet, have no other mailbox option.

And a reminder: Mail which is addressed to any lot-owner as “Unit XX/173 Port Road” will be placed in this box as the mailman has no cross-index for lot numbers and street numbers.

Mail which is regularly placed in this box includes important notices from the Council, Electoral Office, etc., as these agencies do not recognise our streets numbers.

So - even if you have a separate mailbox for your street number and have notified all your personal contacts, or even if you are not actually resident at the Village yet, make sure to check the big “173” mailbox periodically.

John H - on behalf of WMG

This week we had 53 bins out front of the village, many of which were only 1/2 full. Some were two rows deep and too close together and the mechanical arms of the waste truck could not fit between them. In this situation, usually the driver will knock one bin over to make room for the arms. Please take this into account when placing your bins.



Waste & Recycling:
Please only put out your rubbish or recycling bins when they are full. Bins don't need to go out each week.

The bales on frames in the recycling bay are for refundable items only. Today I found in one bale: a biscuit tin, ghee tin, pasta packet, tea packet, cardboard, and other random items, including a huge box from a child's bike which had the reciept still attached ( I know who you are!)

As you can see, some of these items are not even recyclable, and definitely not refundable!
Please check if items are refundable before putting them in the bales - wine bottles are generally not refundable, so they can go in your household yellow-topped recycling bin.
This area is not a dump for your unwanted rubbish, volunteers do not want to clean up after you. Remember that your rubbish is your responsibility, not someone else's.

Hard Rubbish collection:
Last week Amy invited others to “ring the council and book in their own hard rubbish collection”, not to dump rubbish on Amy's pile.  Amy is now out of pocket $50 in dump fees and had to ring the council to come out again and collect what others had dumped. This is not fair and not co-operative, and does not please the council. Please think of others before you act in future, and ask before you dump (including in other people's skip bins!).

The council will be doing a community hard rubbish collection on the first Friday in December from the recycling bay. It is yet to be decided whether this will be in a skip provided by the council. Please do not dump anything until notice is given via the feed.

Please don't organise a hard rubbish collection of your own, the council will come to the village twice per year.

Thank you for your co-operation in keeping our Ecovillage neat and tidy.

Bridget O'Donnell

A few numbers about water and sludge:

It was July 2003 when the first house in the Village was completed and the owner moved in.
On 30 June 2009, we had 56 houses completed and occupied. This means that approximately a third of the homes are now built.

In 2003, we were told that it would take approximately 10 years before we needed to get the 60kL sludge tank in the Waste Water Treatment Plant emptied. We have, however, managed to fill this tank in 6 years, and emptying it this week has cost us nearly $5,000.00

As the number of completed houses is increasing rapidly, including the 24 Cottages due for completion in Aug/Sept, it is likely to be a lot sooner than another 6 years before the sludge tank next needs emptying - probably around 2 – 2.5 years. Once all the houses are built, we could maybe be looking at sludge removal once yearly.

With the associated costs of this process in mind, should we be looking at encouraging something like composting toilets, which would take pressure off the WWTP and keep the waste on site for possible use. We will still need the WWTP but it would be cheaper to run with less sludge in the system.

Should we be asking the BDC to strongly encourage composting toilets in all newly submitted plans?

Would anyone like to put their thinking cap on and do some outside-the-square thinking about dealing with sludge and its costs?

And to finish with - a big statistic: In the six-year period July 2003 to 30 June 2009, we have collectively pushed 10,300,000 (ten million three hundred thousand) liters of water through the WWTP (10,300 kL).

John Heij - for the WWTP Team

Over the last 6 weeks, the average amount of water passing through the WWTP has been around 9 KL per day. Throughput is growing with the Village and represents an increasing resource in terms of water and nutrients.

John Heij

Onkaparinga Council is holding an e-waste (electrical and electronic equipment) and household chemicals drop-off service on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June between 9am and 2pm at the Field Operation Centre, Railway Road, Seaford Meadows (entrance from Seaford Road only). Chemical drop-off is free but there will be small charges for e-waste to cover recycling costs.
 
For costs and more details of accepted equipment and materials, and drop-off location, please see the information brochure ATTACHED or contact Council on 8384 0666.
080605 Toxic & e-waste May08

Hi everyone,
 
Now that Village residents have recorded their mains water usage for the past year, there are some interesting results to display. See the ATTACHMENT to find out how your water consumption compares with that of others in the Village and with Adelaide average.
 
The good news is that, thanks to our rainwater tanks, average consumption in the Village is well below the Adelaide average.
 
The bad news is that there are still nine water accounts outstanding. Please try to get them paid this week so whoever is the Treasurer after the AGM does not have to start the business year by chasing up unpaid bills!
 
John Heij
070813 Mains water use 06-07

John Heij has been running the Village WWTP ("sewage plant") essentially single-handed since it was commissioned nearly 3 years ago. He would like some relief - and it is also not wise to have the management of such a critical piece of infrastructure invested in only one person on site. We are therefore looking for volunteers (living on site) to train into this job.

Volunteers will need to be hygiene-conscious, but also not afraid to get their hands dirty. Being technically minded about plant and machinery is also very helpful. They will need to be "on call" and willing to do regular formal checks on the chemistry of the tanks and the performance of the equipment once to twice a week, and to keep accurate records of these checks. They will also need to liaise with outside contractors - e.g., Eimco (formerly Aeroflo who supplied the plant) and the Australian Water Quality Centre (AWQC, a division of SA Water) who perform the required regular water quality compliance tests.

We really do need a volunteer doing this job if at all possible. If an outside maintenance contract is required, there is only one firm available that is even willing to quote on this unique small-scale plant. They have quoted $5,808 (GST incl) per annum for one visit per month, with each extra visit to be charged at $350. All parts would be charged at cost plus 10%. (Currently, John or Malcolm Dispain have been picking up necessary parts to keep these costs to a minimum.) Note that the annual service contract covered by this quote would still require a volunteer to do the compulsory weekly checks. If the external contractor is needed to perform ALL the checks and services currently covered in-house, the annual cost to the Community could well approach $20,000 - 25,000. We can't let this happen!

If you would be willing to volunteer, please contact John by Email or phone - 8556 6892 - to discuss.

During the past year (i.e., the period from 17/5/06 to 23/5/07) 5371 kilolitres of SA (town-supply) water was used within the AAEV site. Of this, 2557 kl was used for private purposes by the lot owners (plus all the rainwater collected in residents' tanks). The remaining 2814 kl's of town-supply water were used for watering trees and plants around the Village. This water has cost us a total of $2,787 plus $360 in supply charges - ie, a total of $3,147

During this same period the Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) pumped 1989 kl out on to the small wood-lot on the farm.
Since the previous email about wastewater, outflow of the WWTP has risen from 5.4 kl to 7 kl a day.

As we are enjoying such good rains at the moment and the woodlot certainly does not need additional water just now, I can't help but wonder if a previously mooted suggestion to store the WWTP winter output in the dams on the farm shouldn't be revisited. If this were done, the wastewater could potentially be shandied with collected storm water, allowing for improvement of the quality of WWTP output for irrigation purposes. In the early part of the dry period this same water could then be pumped onto the farm area. Might be worth thinking about as water becomes more of an issue for the future?