Recycling
Recycling will be a major sustainability feature of the ecovillage.
This will be done in co-operation with council as much as possible. The homes will have bins for each type of rubbish, e.g. paper, cans and bottles, food scraps, and other items. Cans, bottles and paper products will probably go to council, and food scraps given to the chooks.
Items such as scrap metal, IT equipment, whitegoods, tyres, wood, plastic, etc., can be taken to the recycling centre, which will be a small building on-site adjacent to the workshop. Items will be sorted into piles, and residents can help themselves. Then, once a month, an industrial recycling company such as Sims will come and collect all the items that nobody wants.
Our intent is that all unwanted materials and items on the site will be properly and sustainably recycled.
Paper and wood
A major part of the philosophy underlying Silvergreen is that trees are considerably more valuable when alive, since they remove carbon from the atmosphere and provide us with healthy oxygen. Hence, we seek to minimize the use of wood and paper on-site as much as we can, which is part of the reason why Silvergreen's homes are largely constructed from steel.
To reduce paper usage, we will encourage the concept of a "paperless community", made easier by the fact that the whole community will be networked. Right from the beginning, almost all communications about this project will be electronic.
