Babies or Bugs?

Last night, when I checked on my worms, I noticed little white spots all over a piece of orange peel.  I was ecstatic!  I thought my worms were reproducing and that those were the little egg cocoons.  Wrong!  After some serious scouring of the Internet, turns out we have mites which are tiny bugs that can be harmless in small numbers.  Not quite as exciting.  I learned that there are two different kinds of the little critters: one that competes for food with my worms and one that eats my worms for food.  So to be safe I researched ways to get rid of them and discovered they have a sweet tooth. Mites are attracted to sweeter items in the bin (hence the cluster on the orange peel) so by placing these items on the bedding you will be able to just remove the mite-covered scrap and either rinse off or discard.  So I removed scraps with high populations of the bugs and will repeat again with melon rinds (a mite favourite).

We have also had some interest in our poll this week (it's located just under our tickers, if you haven't checked it out yet) around where to recycle some of the less common items on the list.  The Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council provides a comprehensive list of recycling facilities throughout Saskatchewan.  All you do is select your City/Town and the item you are wanting to recycle and it will provide you with a depot in your neighbourhood.  You can also search "All Materials" if you want a list of all the possible things you can recycle in your area.  Check it out for more information!

Today was also garbage day!  Almost two full weeks with the same bag, compared to almost weekly changes before.  I also added my bathroom garbage to this bag and it was still down!  I had a total of about 3.8lbs of garbage and once I calculated the different bins over a year and added them together, my new annual total is 99.4lbs!  I have saved over 300lbs of waste from ending up in our landfill this year!  My next goal is the first part of our slogan; the most important part of our slogan.  REDUCE!  I am still throwing away a lot of needless garbage from excess packaging.  The convenience of prepackaged items is what is filling up my bag, so I am going to start taking packaging into consideration when I am grocery shopping from now on!  I will let you know what I find!

-TheDirt