What do you do if you’re a small tree chipping company and you don’t want to spend your money on dumping fees? What do you do if you’re a city planner trying to keep your landfills from filling up so fast? What do you do if you’re a homeowner who wants to do some sustainable and frugal landscaping pathways?
A new website in Portland Oregon solves this three way problem with chipdrop. You open an account and give your address, and whatever local tree chipping company has a load of chips they need to dump, they drive it to your house and dump it free in whatever location you mention. It helps the tree chipping companies because otherwise they’d have to pay dump fees. It helps the homeowner because you get free wood chips delivered to your door. It helps the city because it doesn’t get it’s landfills full of woodchips. Everybody wins.
We took advantage of this new service and created front and backyard pathways! Our load, we were told, was mostly douglas fir, so the whole yard smells wonderful, and it’s safe for our backyard free range chickens.
Here’s an innovative apartment building in Sri Lanka. It uses recycled water (including rainwater) to water the outdoor plants and flush toilets, and a solar panel to run the lobby lights and other shared resources.
Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson, is a book of fun and practical ideas written by a frugal French mom living in America with her American husband and 2 boys. While several of her ideas I already have in practice (she details composting, de-cluttering, simplifying), I found many new ideas such as a simple multi-purpose balm, techniques for waterproofing leather, and special towel folding techniques to carry food to picnics and wrap gifts. So far I’ve tried her cocoa powder eye shadow, where I brushed cocoa powder on my eyelids. I then asked my 17 year old son what he thought. He was like “Mom – it makes you look old and wrinkly!” I put on my glasses and sure enough even though I liked the color, this is a tip for someone much younger…but it was fun and simple to try!
FallingFruit.org is an an urban harvesting map that brings together community and city data bases from all over the internet/world. Find, add, and edit information on the wild edibles growing in your neighborhood. Check out 
Rare earth elements are an integral part of many of today’s electronic devices, serving as magnets, catalysts and superconductors. Recently, scientists discovered that some of these pricy minerals can be reclaimed from industrial wastewater instead of being mined from the earth.
This do-it-yourself furniture design can be downloaded for local manufacture, and is the start of a very cool idea. In it’s current rendition, there’s a fair amount of wood waste, but what if future furniture designed created less waste because it was square instead of round? I like that the pieces fit together in such a way that you don’t need other tools. I like that you can use whatever is your favorite local material, and give local business a leg up, instead of manufacturing in far away countries and then $hipping the products to you. Maybe this software and technology could be used to create components for my 
Today is the first day of senior year for my son. I’m so excited for what this school year holds for him: a computing systems class, helping one teacher by community mentoring Algebra, and helping a second teacher by making photocopies/classroom assistance, plus a college probability and statistics class and a government/economics class. He’s got early dismissal to continue his paid job working part time at a local computer store.
Better Ideas Now 