The first thing people ask me when I tell them we've gone to a zero waste household is what does that mean. The immediate follow-up is, does that include recycling? Well we'd definitely have some serious trouble if it didn't. So a zero waste household is a household with no garbage can. Thus no magic garbage faeries to come whisk away our "waste" once a week. No more out of sight out of mind with our twenty-first century disposable realities. And yes, this does mean getting super serious about recycling.

Zero waste is about embodying the whole triple R threat - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Granted our society is currently really big on the last one, the first two being a little under-supported in their invariably anti-capitalist practice; however, zero waste is kind of an all encompassing life style shift that has begun to alter how I relate to material objects. Things that used to get tossed in my garbage can now sit on my dry rack, packaging taken apart, wrappers and tubs cleaned and made in good enough shape for the mixed plastic bin at the recycling depot - a place where my initial zero waste endeavor started four weeks ago.

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OK, so my roomie, Miss Bliss, and I talked it over last weekend and we decided as a household to take on the zero waste challenge. Inspired by a recent article in Ascent Magazine detailing one woman's waste free odyssey, it made me think it's time to take my environmental consciousness to the next level. So I have been doing my research, which mostly consisted at re-looking at what the f**k I was throwing in the garbage, and paying a visit to the local recycling depot to have a long chat about what they accepted, and what they didn't. It turned out in this day and age you could recycle quite a bit.

Already a low waste household, about one shopping bag every 2 weeks, our little cabin here at Latimers End seemed the perfect candidate to raise the bar on sustainability. Surely we, if anyone, had a good chance of doing away with our weekly trash pick-up. Certainly we could be using the can for other things. Already I'm thinking it would be a great robust vessel to mix up manure tea for the garden in, but welcome suggestions. One day it will certainly be a blog post all it's own - 101 Things To Do With A Garbage Can: Besides Throwing Garbage In It.

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For Adham Shaikh, music embodies a certain sacredness that defies simplistic divisions of “acoustic” or “electronic.” Desiring to create bridges between different musical styles, within the fused roots of Shaikh’s tribal groove and dub-laced downtempo, he says he hopes to discover “the unpredictable creative thing that as a musician I am always seeking out.” [...]