Category: Conservation

Categories that relate to conserving natural resources in all it’s forms, like the 3R’s, but only about the first one: Reduce

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Will Facebook ever die? No, not when there are groups such as “Dumpster Diving in Canada Eh!!!”

Dumpster diving: Its not just for hobos and people living under bridges. Real heroes save useful items from the trash every day. People with careers, investments and a desire to reduce waste poke their noses into garbage bins to scrutinize what businesses and individuals are throwing out.

Dumpster Diving Elevator Pitch

As Kayla on the above mentioned group shares, stores don’t usually like people diving in their bins. However, I have had some success with this route. it takes some practice to “sell” your request/idea to get a favourable response. My friends and I sometimes go “Day Binning”, but be prepared to talk and schmooze the backdoor workers. It can be even more rewarding! Many people have guilt when ordered to throw out good/useful commodities and your “recycling effort” alleviates their guilt, and you are golden: you now have permission to be there!

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An attempt to capture the current weather station data for archiving on my website.

The Agriculture Forestry and Economic Development branch of the Government of Alberta maintains a bunch of weather stations. One of these sits outside Wimborne. It is almost as good as a home based weather station.

I enquired to the person who does the programming for the data. Is there an easy way to post the data to my website? No.

So I am forced to take screenshots of the data page and post them randomly.

I really wish the data was open and accessible [ see https://open.alberta.ca/opendata ]. After all the data is generated with our tax dollars.

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Something about “today there’s a chinook and you better get out and take advantage of the warm weather by decorating a big tree” How do you get those balls on the tree when you only have a small ladder? My solution is to use copper wire to make the hook, and a long stick. The copper wire is just flexible enough to hold and grab the branch while not deforming. Number 16 gauge perfect but the most common is household wire being solid 14 gauge copper wire

Don’t have any copper wire laying about? Join the recycle economy: Just ask your local electrician for some “wire trimmings”, or a street scrapper. You’ll find street-level scrappers dumpster diving in any town or city.  These people make a living by taking what others throw away and turning it into Cash. As of today bare bright copper stands at $2.70 a pound at the scrap yard but very few yards sell what they collect from street level scrappers. Don’t ask me why I don’t know.

Hopefully that wind doesn’t blow all the decorations off before Christmas.