#sustainablility

Tips and teachings from James Prigioni on how to turn your lawn (or any dirt space) into a thriving food forest.

Image credit: Rodolfo Marques  By Idha Valeur 

With Christmas sneaking up on us and December in full swing and the added focus on sustainability we take a look at how you can make better material choices for a slightly more sustainable Christmas. Let’s talk about Christmas trees. In the December issue of Materials World our news writer deep dived into the debate between the real and the fake tree to find out once and for all – which is the most sustainable?

It all depends on consumer behaviour and how that plays into the tree’s lifecycle. The life cycle analysis of real versus plastic Christmas trees showed that for a fake tree to be sustainable the owner would need to keep the tree for more than five years and if they donated it to a charity shop or similar when looking to upgrade that would improve the analysis.

While if you were to choose a real tree, prioritise buying a locally sourced tree because transportation emissions play into its overall sustainability. One could make it more sustainable by re-using the tree after the festive season by replanting it in the garden etc. Whatever you choose, make an informed purchase and assess whether you are likely to keep an artificial tree for several years or what fits with your lifestyle. Read the full analysis in MW here: https://bit.ly/2PcC8Je

What about wrapping? There are certain key aspects to be aware of when it comes to wrapping paper. The most important factor to think about is ‘Is it recyclable?’. There is a simple test you can do to assess this, scrunch the paper in your hand. If the paper remains crumpled up it is safe to recycle. If it doesn’t, keep it away from the recycling bin. 

Video credit: Recycle Now. 

‘Wrapping paper is often dyed, laminated and/or contains non-paper additives such as gold and silver coloured shapes, glitter, plastics etc which cannot be recycled,’ Recycle Now’s website states.  

Wrapping that is safe to use include brown paper and newspapers or you can buy recycled wrapping paper from several companies. For decoration fabric ribbons, twine and jute string are all better for the environment than shiny options. In general, avoiding metallic, shiny and/or glittery options is a safe move. Another tip from Recycle Now is to avoid using sticky tape as this effects the paper’s recyclability. They recommend using ribbon or coloured string instead to secure the wrapping around the gifts to your loved ones.

Decorating with holly, evergreen and pine cones or cinnamon sticks that are good options for decor says Recycle Now. If they are not covered in glitter they can be composted after use. 

Reusing is the easiest, cheapest, fastest way to combat climate change! Our society might lead us to believe that we need this, or we need that, but in reality that is not actually the case. Having lots of currently popular stuff is bad for the environment, bad for your wallet, promotes horrible industries like fast fashion, and takes up a lot of your time. By reusing what you already have, you’ll find that you’ll be more creative, save your cash for what is really important (such as experiences!) and will really make a wonderful impact on our earth :) Here are just a few simple household items that you can easily reuse!

1. NEWSPAPERS can be used as wrapping paper, fire starters, packing material (instead of packing peanuts or bubble wrap), paper towels, scratch paper and much, much more!

2. OLD CLOTHING can be sold on DEPOP, donated to a charity shop/thrift store, made into quilts, used as dishtowels, made into sewable patches, turned into bandanas, turned into bags, or swapped with a friend or sibling

3. WATER USED FOR COOKING (if there is no salt) can be used to water plants, clean dishes or as water for your pets (or yourself)

4. PLASTIC WATER BOTTLES can be used as pots for plants, as cups, as pen holders, as jewelry holders, and can even be made into a makeshift sprinkler (if you poke holes on the bottom and fasten to hose with duct tape!) 

https://www.boredpanda.com/plastic-bottle-recycling-ideas/?utm_source=ecosia&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic 

5. OLD MOUSE PADS can be used as gardening knee pads, sponges, toe pads for high heels, and/or drink coasters

6. OLD BOOKS can be sold, turned into a cover for a kindle or tablet, turned into art (paint works really well), given to used book stores, or given to a friend or family member (great gift idea!)

7. BOTTLECAPS can be turned into candles, magnets, pins, buttons, art, windchimes, hair clips, turned into bracelets, earrings or necklaces, or turned into fishing lures

8. PENS AND PENCILS can be donated to local schools, re-sharpened, or turned into art!

9. OLD CELLPHONES can be sold back to many companies, given to a friend or relative, or used for electronic parts (the same is true for computers and tablets!)

10. STRAWS can be used to prevent jewelry from getting tangled during travel, to store bobby pins, to hold seasonings (like salt and pepper) if you are camping or travelling (if you tape the ends), and lastly, can be used as great cat toys :)

https://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/23-practical-ways-reuse-disposable-straws/

Mosa Teams With Lush Cosmetics to Spearhead Sustainable Retail

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ZAZI Vintage | http://www.zazi-vintage.com/

Zazi Vintage is a Luxury ethical fashion label with as main focus sustainability and women empowerment. The aim is give a new life to traditional vintage and create a fashion label without any new physical production by working with collected vintage materials and rejected fabrics.

We work closely together with women empowering NGO’s like the Institute for Philanthropy and humanitarian development in India. By avoiding any new production Zazi uses the overwhelming beauty that is already there.

As an online trading platform Zazi creates a bridge between the women here and those from the place where the pieces were found. By linking these worlds, beautiful projects and local women worldwide will be supported.

Most Modern Structures Are Built Yo Last 50 Years Or So, But Ingenious Ancient Engineering Has Kept This Watery City Afloat For More Than 1,600 Years – Using Only Wood.

— Anna Bressanin

Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC

As any local knows, Venice is an upside-down forest. The city, which turned 1604 years old on March 25, is built on the foundations of millions of short wooden piles, pounded in the ground with their tip facing downwards. These trees – larch, oak, alder, pine, spruce and elm of a length ranging between 3.5m (11.5ft) to less than 1m (3ft) – have been holding up stone palazzos and tall belltowers for centuries, in a true marvel of engineering leveraging the forces of physics and nature.

In most modern structures, reinforced concrete and steel do the work that this inverted forest has been doing for centuries. But despite their strength, few foundations today could last as long as Venice's. "Concrete or steel piles are designed [with a guarantee to last] 50 years today," says Alexander Puzrin, professor of geomechanics and geosystems engineering at the ETH university in Zurich, Switzerland. "Of course, they might last longer, but when we build houses and industrial structures, the standard is 50 years of life."

Building To Last

Only once, early on in his career, Puzrin has been asked to provide a guarantee of 500 years for a construction a Baháʼí Temple in an Illegal Regime of the Zionist 🐖🐷🐖🐗, the Isra-hell (Occupied Palestine).

"I was kind of shocked because this was unusual," he recalls. "I was really scared, and they wanted me to sign. I called my boss in Tel Aviv, a very experienced, old engineer and I said, 'What are we going to do? They want 500 years.' He answered, '500 years? [pause]. Sign.' None of us is going to be there."

The Venetian piles technique is fascinating for its geometry, its centuries-old resilience, and for its sheer scale. No-one is exactly sure how many millions of piles there are under the city, but there are 14,000 tightly packed wooden poles in the foundations of the Rialto bridge alone, and 10,000 oak trees under the San Marco Basilica, which was built in 832AD.

"I was born and raised in Venice," says Caterina Francesca Izzo, environmental chemistry and cultural heritage professor at the University of Venice. "Growing up, like everyone else, I knew that underneath the Venetian buildings, there are the trees of Cadore [the mountain region next to Venice]. But I didn't know how these piles were placed, how they were counted and knocked down, nor the fact that the battipali (literally the 'pile hitters') had a very important profession. They even had their own songs. It is fascinating from a technical and technological point of view."

The battipali would hammer down the piles by hand, and they would sing an ancient song to keep the rhythm – a haunting and repetitive melody with lyrics that praise Venice, its republican glory, its Catholic faith, and declare death to the enemy of the time, the Turks. On a more lighthearted note, a Venetian expression still in use today, na testa da bater pai (literally 'a head that is good to pound down the piles') is a colourful way of saying that someone is dull or slow-witted.

The people who drove the piles into the silt were known as battipali, or pile hitters, and used a song to help them keep the rhythm as they worked (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC)

The piles were stuck as deep as possible, until they couldn't be pounded down any further, starting at the outer edge of the structure and moving towards the centre of the foundations, usually driving nine piles per square metre in a spiral shape. The heads were then sawn to obtain a regular surface, which would lay below sea-level.

Transverse wooden structures – either zatteroni (boards) or madieri (beams) – were placed on top. In the case of the bell towers, these beams or boards were up to 50cm (20in) thick. For other buildings, the dimensions were 20cm (8in) or even less. Oak provided the most resilient wood, but it was also the most precious. (Later on, oak would only be used to build ships – it was too valuable to stick in the mud.) On top of this wooden foundation, workers would place the stone of the building.

The Republic of Venice soon began protecting its forests to provide sufficient wood for construction, as well as for ships. "Venice invented sylviculture," explains Nicola Macchioni, research director at the institute for bioeconomy at Italy's National Council for Research, referring to the practice of cultivating trees. "The first official sylviculture document in Italy is indeed from the Magnificent Community of the Fiemme Valley [to the north-west of Venice], dating from 1111AD. It details rules to exploit the woods without depleting them."

According to Macchioni, these conservation practices must have been in use years before they were written down. "That explains why the Fiemme Valley is still covered by a lush fir forest today." Countries such as England, however, were facing wood shortages by the middle of the 16th Century already, he adds.

The wooden piles beneath Venice are slowly degrading as anaerobic bacteria attack the cell walls of the wood fibres (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC)

Venice is not the only city relying on wooden piles for foundations – but there are key differences that make it unique. Amsterdam is another city partially built on wooden piles – here and in many other northern European cities, they go all the way down until they reach the bedrock, and they work like long columns, or like the legs of a table.

"Which is fine if the rock is close to the surface," says Thomas Leslie, professor of architecture at the University of Illinois. But in many regions, the bedrock is well beyond the reach of a pile. On the shore of Lake Michigan in the US, where Leslie is based, the bedrock could be 100ft (30m) below the surface. "Finding trees that big is difficult, right? There were stories of Chicago in the 1880s where they tried to drive one tree trunk on top of another, which, as you can imagine ended up not working. Finally, they realised that you could rely on the friction of the soil."

The principle is based on the idea of reinforcing the soil, by sticking in as many piles as possible, raising substantial friction between piles and soil. "What's clever about that," says Leslie, "is that you're sort of using the physics… The beauty of it is that you're using the fluid nature of the soil to provide resistance to hold the buildings up." The technical term for this is hydrostatic pressure, which essentially means that the soil "grips" the piles if many are inserted densely in one spot, Leslie says.

Indeed, the Venetian piles work this way – they are too short to reach bedrock, and instead keep the buildings up thanks to friction. But the history of this way of building goes back further still.

The technique was mentioned by 1st-Century Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius; Romans would use submerged piles to build bridges, which again are close to water. Water gates in China were built with friction piles too. The Aztecs used them in Mexico City, until the Spanish came, tore down the ancient city and built their Catholic cathedral on top, Puzrin notes. "The Aztecs knew how to build in their environment much better than the Spanish later, who have now huge problems with this metropolitan cathedral [where the floor is sinking unevenly]."

Puzrin holds a graduate class at ETH that investigates famous geotechnical failures. "And this is one of these failures. This Mexico City cathedral, and Mexico City in general, is an open-air museum of everything that can go wrong with your foundations."

The wood, soil and water all combine to provide Venice's foundations with remarkable strength (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC)

After more than a millennium and a half in the water, Venice's foundations have proved remarkably resilient. They are not, however, immune to damage.

Ten years ago, a team from the universities of Padova and Venice (departments ranging from forestry to engineering and cultural heritage) investigated the condition of the city's foundations, starting from the belltower of the Frari Church, built in 1440 on alder piles.

The Frari belltower has been sinking 1mm (0.04in) a year since its construction, for a total of 60cm (about 24in). Compared with churches and buildings, belltowers have more weight distributed on a smaller surface and therefore sink deeper and faster, "like a stiletto heel", says Macchioni, who was part of the team investigating the city’s foundations.

Caterina Francesca Izzo was working on the field, core drilling, collecting and analyzing wood samples from underneath churches, belltowers and from the side of the canals, which were being emptied out and cleaned up at the time. She said that they had to be careful while they were working on the bottom of the dry canal, to avoid the wastewater sporadically gushing from the side pipes.

The team found that throughout the structures they investigated, the wood was damaged (bad news), but the system of water, mud and wood was keeping it all together (good news).

They debunked the common belief that the wood underneath the city doesn't rot because it's in an oxygen-free, or anaerobic, condition – bacteria do attack wood, even in absence of oxygen. But bacteria action is much slower than the action of fungi and insects, which operate in the presence of oxygen. Furthermore, water fills up the cells that are emptied out by bacteria, allowing wooden piles to maintain their shape. So even if the wooden piles are damaged, the whole system of wood, water and mud is held together under intense pressure, and is kept resilient for centuries.

"Is there anything to worry about? Yes and no, but we should still consider continuing this type of research," says Izzo. Since the sampling 10 years ago, they hadn't collected new ones, mainly because of the logistics involved.

It's not known for how many more hundreds of years the foundations will last, says Macchioni. "However, [it will last] as long as the environment remains the same. The foundation system works because it is made of wood, soil and water." The soil creates an oxygen-free environment, the water both contributes to that and maintains the shape of the cells, and the wood provides friction. Without one of these three elements, the system collapses.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, wood was completely replaced by cement in foundation construction. In recent years, though, a new trend of building with wood has gained increased interest, including the rise of wooden skyscrapers. "It's kind of the cool material right now, and for really good reasons," comments Leslie. Wood is a carbon sink, it's biodegradable and thanks to its ductility, it's considered among the most earthquake-resistant materials.

"We can't of course build entire cities on wood nowadays because we are too many on the planet," adds Macchioni, but it's undeniable that without artificial materials and without motors, ancient builders just had to be more ingenious. Venice is not the only city with wooden foundations, but it is "the only one [where the friction technique was used] en masse that is still surviving today and is so insanely beautiful", adds Puzrin. "There were people out there who didn't study soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering, and yet they produced something we can only dream about producing, which lasted so long. They were amazing, intuitive engineers who did exactly the right thing, taking advantage of all these special conditions."