Rag rugs or red rags

During the general sorting out of house contents leading up to the house move (date still uncertain) I've accumulated the usual pile of clothes that aren't suitable to give to many charity shops.  What to do with them?  It annoys me to have to throw them out with the general rubbish.

The Salvation Army and Oxfam do recycle textiles, selling on unwearable clothes or fabrics as raw materials.  They can be shredded and used as insulation materials, in roofing felts, padding, or used as cloths in a range of industries.  Wool can be reclaimed and made into yarn by specialists.  TRAID takes torn or stained clothing and remakes into one-off garments which are then sold under the TRAIDremade label.

Boujad rug from Flickr/Luciano Ghersi

Taking TRAID's initiative a step further are women in Morocco who are using pieces of material from old clothes to creating rugs in the Essaouira tradition.  They use a hook to knot the pieces of fabric on to a canvas backing and let their imaginations create beautiful ethnic-style rugs in geometric designs.  Développement Durable has some good pictures of the colourful end product.

There are other ways to make rag rugs - braiding, crochet - but I'm no crafty expert.  I will not be making us a rug out of the odd sock mountain, but I'll be giving them to Oxfam rather than to landfill.

Earth Day in Europe

Frankly it's hard to tell, there is very little mention of it anywhere, but there is a report about recycling in France, which says that, according to the results of a poll, French people have become used to sorting their waste for recycling and are happy to do it. They would even be prepared to do more to make it more cost-effective.

Photo from Flickr user Commune de Saint-Thonan. Creative Commons licence.

The sign made by children at school says, "Selective sorting is easy. Think of selective sorting".

In our area of France, rubbish is collected twice a week, from the roadside. We are expected to sort anything recyclable and put out tow bags or bins - blue for recyclable wasted, black for everything else. They will take almost all recyclable waste apart from glass which has to be brought to the depot.

In our area of England though it is a different story. The waste is collected once a fortnight, alternating between recyclable and other waste. There is a considerable limit on what can be recycled - only paper, cardboard, cans, some plastic bottles. No plastic bags, no yoghurt pots, no polystyrene, no aluminium foil containers.

It would be interesting to conduct asimilar survey, taking into account the different practices to see if that had any bearing on attitudes.

It would also be interesting to hear of other areas' recycling possibilities. I find our UK system very restrictive. Is it the same elsewhere?

Underground rubbish collections

What if we could put all our rubbish in a bin and have it whisked away as if by magic. In Narbonne, in the south of France, they are installing just such a system which should come into action in April 2008. No more noisy and smelly lorries.

The system, Envac, uses Swedish technology. Rubbish bins in the roads and even within some apartment blocks will be connected to an underground network and the rubbish will be transported by means of a pneumatic pressure to a treatment centre. The construction of this centre started last week.

The technology has been in existence since 1961 and is already used in Barcelona, Copenhagen and the airport at Kuala Lumpur. A quarter of the energy required will be provided by solar panels and the remainder will come from other forms of renewable energy. Although there is a cost of 5 million euros, this should lead to a significant reduction in the rubbish collection charges.

Recycling newspaper in 1927

When we first explored the attic of our house we found an incredible array of broken furniture, books, wine racks (containing empty bottles), pictures, documents, all sorts of luggage, and stacks upon stacks of newspapers.

In the stacks of newspapers were some supplements from "Veillées de Chaumières", dated between 1923 and 1928. They are mostly handicrafts, recipes, and household tips. In a way it's a shame the whole magazines weren't kept because they make fascinating reading. I managed to spirit these away because my magpie tendencies are rather frowned upon.

I was looking through these yesterday and found that even in 1928, they recycled newspaper: Don't throw out old newspapers, they can be very useful.

I glanced through the list of uses and one caught my eye. To translate the third paragraph:

Old newspapers can equally serve as undergarments; tacked on to fabric, they make a very comfortable lining.

You would never think that these models, on the opposite page, could be wearing newspaper undergarments. Didn't they rustle rather a lot?

So, you see, I've provided you with a recycled way of recycling, and you would never have known if I hadn't retrieved those papers from the recycling bin. My magpie ways are totally vindicated.