S1E48 - Paige on Composting

Explicit content warning

08/12/22 • 70 min

Episode Notes

Episode summary Margaret talks with Paige, who works in composting and humanure systems, about how to set up systems for disposing of food and human waste, different kinds of systems that can be used including worm composting, and the importance of thinking about the scale and purpose of your system.

Guest Info Paige can be found on Twitter @badcompost

Host Info Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Penumbra City Spot If you would like to play test our Penumbra City TTRPG with your friends, contact us at [email protected]

Transcript

Paige on Composting

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. Well, I'm one of the hosts, but I'm your host today. But, now there's new hosts for the show, which is very exciting to me. As much as I love listening to the sound of my own voice all the time, sometimes I like listening to other people talk. And, today we are going to be talking to Paige about composting, we're going to be talking about what to do with stuff that rots and why it's so important. And I don't know, lots of stuff around shit and things like that. I'm really excited about this kind of selfishly, because I have a lot of questions that are for my own personal use as someone who composts, and you know, has lived off grid a lot and stuff like that. So I think, I hope that you will get a lot out of it, and this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.

JINGLE

Margaret 01:49 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess kind of why people should listen to you about compost.

Paige 01:58 Thank you so much for having me. My name is Paige. I use she/her pronouns. I guess I started composting at a pretty young age. We had a pile at my parents house growing up and then more recently, actually worked for Tucson's city composting program when it was run through their university, so was on like an industrial scale operation for a couple of months. I currently work at the food bank in their farm and garden program. And I have helped them redesign their worm composting system as well as their just general composting system as well as installed composting toilets on site. I've also worked with friends of a land project and help them set up a composting system for humanure as well as just like food waste.

Margaret 02:51 Cool. For anyone who's listening, if you can hear a squeaking in the background is because I gave my dog a toy that I thought didn't have a squeaker in it. And I was proven mistaken. So, I apologize for that. But okay, so composting, what is composting, that's where things where you just like throw an apple into the woods, and hope for the best.

Paige 03:12 So composting isn't just kind of throwing stuff and hoping for the best. It's usually just taking, like organic material. And there's different types of composting, there's different systems, but it's kind of creating in a controlled environment to process what would be waste products into something that you can use more as a soil amendment, maybe for your garden, and maybe for fruit trees. But it's just yeah, processing waste into something really valuable and useful.

Margaret 03:40 I get really excited about it. I have this kind of like scavenger mindset leftover from when I was more of like a squatter and traveler. But, I feel like food waste is like the main way I can still really feel that, like scratch that itch, you know? I mean, I guess I do it sometimes with other stuff where I try and scavenge. But like, I get really excited by the idea that you can like not have food waste be waste. And so I don't know, I'm very excited about this. Okay, so what are some o...

Episode Notes

Guest Info Paige can be found on Twitter @badcompost

Host Info Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Penumbra City Spot If you would like to play test our Penumbra City TTRPG with your friends, contact us at [email protected]

Transcript

Paige on Composting

JINGLE

Margaret 01:49 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess kind of why people should listen to you about compost.

Previous Episode

S1E47 - This Month In The Apocalypse with Margaret, Brooke, and Casandra

Episode Notes

Episode summary In this new monthly segment, members of the Strangers Collective discuss current events as they relate to community preparedness. If you're watching the news and wondering what's going on with inflation, supply chain shortages, the heat "wave", or Q'anon talking about space lasers and the black holes that are causing all of this, tune in. The group breaks down the mechanics of inflation, why prices are what they are, why we're seeing shortages, and ways you can prepare now for when things get worse.

Host Info Casandra can be found on Twitter @hey_casandra. Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke is just great and can be found at Strangers helping up keep our finances intact and on Twitter @ogemakweBrooke

Transcript

This Month In The Apocalypse

Margaret 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, your podcast for feels like the times. I'm one of your hosts, Margaret killjoy, because joining me today are two other co-hosts if y'all want to introduce yourself.

Casandra 00:28 I'm Cassandra.

Brooke 00:30 I'm Brooke.

Margaret 00:32 And today, we are starting a new, a new fun series talking about all the fun stuff that's going to be coming your way soon. It's called This Month In The Apocalypse, because we've realized that on this podcast, we talk a lot with different people about how to do different skills, about different specific issues, but there's so much happening these days that it seems worthwhile to kind of keep track of this as it happens, all the different things that are happening, I don't know, does that decent description of what the hell we're trying to do?

Casandra 01:09 Yeah.

Margaret 01:11 And you will be excited to know that this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

Jingle song 01:24 It's going down, and you're invited for what they sell it. We buy in, there is no running. There is no hiding. There's only fighting or dying. It's going down, and you're invited for what they're selling, we aint buying. There is no running. There is no hiding. There's only fighting or dying.

Jingle Host 01:53 It's going down is a digital Community Center from anarchists, Anti-Fascist, autonomous, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements. Our mission is to provide an autonomous and resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action.

Jingle Host 2 02:10 Go to itsgoingdown.org for daily updates, check out our online store for ways to donate and rate and follow us on iTunes if you like this podcast

Margaret 02:27 We're back from the jingle. I'm used to having another podcast where there's actual ads, which sucks. And so I don't know how to talk anymore. So, nothing really happened this month and everything is continuing as it should. I believe there's no major supply chain interruptions nothing forecasted bad to happen. Does that that match with the yall's understanding?

Brooke 02:54 Yeah, good done, end of pod. Move on with our lives.

Margaret 03:01 What do we want to talk about first? Want to talk about shortages? All the stuff there's shortages of?

Brooke 03:09 Sure.

Casandra 03:10 Yeah, I was looking at a list. And it's it's just everything. They're shortages in everything.

Margaret 03:16 Give me some example.

Casandra 03:17 It started out like meat, dairy, eggs. And then it was like produce, aluminum for packaging things, plastic packaging things, fuel to get things to places.

Margaret 03:27 Yeah,...

Next Episode

S1E49 - Andre on Solar Power, DIY Internet, Mesh Networks, and Solar Punk

Episode Notes

Episode summary Andre and Margaret talk about a lot of things. They talk about recycling/reusing/remelting plastics, turning them into fuel, setting up solar power systems, setting up DIY internet, intranets and mesh networks as well as some concepts dealing with solar punk and hydroponics, and of course how most things can be easily analogized to baking a cake.

Guest Info Andre can be found at www.anarchosolarpunk.substack.com, or on Twitter @HydroponicTrash or on TikTok @HydroponicTrash.

Host Info Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Transcript

Andre on Solar Power, DIY Internet, Mesh Networks, and Solar Punk

Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And I use 'she' and 'they' pronouns. And I am very excited about this week's episode, which I guess I probably say, most weeks. But, I'm excited to be talking to Andre, who is someone I first ran across his work because someone was just I think someone sent it to me or was showing me these, these pictures of someone who had 'hydroponic trash' as the user name, and was talking about making off grid internet through mesh networking. And I was like, "Yeah, this is up my alley," but not my alley that I've actually explored. It's a alley that I'm interested in. So I'm very excited. I think you all will be very excited. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show in the network.

01:45 Jingle

Margaret 02:23 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then maybe kind of a little bit about yourself about the kind of stuff that we're going to be talking about today. Like how you got into it or what you do?

Andre 02:34 Yeah, for sure. My name is Andre, my pronouns are he/him. I go by Hydroponic Trash on Twitter and Tik Tok. I focus a lot on upcycling things that people would normally kind of regard as like trash, like recycling plastic containers to make indoor vertical hydroponic gardens. I'm a hacker, a gardener, a woodworker, I kind of tend to do a lot of random shit. So. I also write speculative solar punk fiction on combining technology, both low and high tech, with social change, and balancing that with the ecosystem. With that being said, I've been also kind of focusing in on infrastructure, and how people can build passive and active systems to meet their basic needs like food, water, shelter, communications, electricity. Right now, what that kind of looks like is making off grid intranet networks, off grid solar power, and some other passive projects that kind of deal with DIY off grid stuff.

Margaret 03:47 Yeah! You basically just listed all of my interests. This very exciting to me. I'm going to ask at the end of the episode as well, but do you want to say where people can find like, say, for example, your speculative fiction, like, I know that you write about a lot of the stuff that you do, and you also write fiction. Where can people find that?

Andre 04:03 Yeah, so mainly, I post my long form stuff on anarchosolarpunk.substack.com. So mainly post my like, long form writing on Substack. But, I post a lot of written form content and other stuff to my Twitter, HydroponicTrash and Tik Tok, I posted videos whenever I can make videos about a whole bunch of various different topics or projects that I'm working on.

Margaret 04:29 That's cool. Okay, so I was gonna start with off grid internet. But first, I want to ask you about recycling plastic trash, because I'm really excited about ways to...recycling is like fake, righ...