Compostable vs. Degradable vs. Biodegradable
Eco-Living, Gardens, Sustainability

Compostable vs. Degradable vs. Biodegradable – What’s the Difference?

In a world that’s far more aware of the importance of sustainability, it can be a challenge to get to grips with marketing jargon. You want to make sure the products you purchase are safe for the environment, but how do you understand the various terms that describe if it is or not?

Three terms you will see thrown around quite a bit are: compostable, degradable, and biodegradable. Do they mean the same thing? Are they different? Is one better than the other? Read on to learn what these three words mean, and if you should be using any product labelled with any of them more than the other.

What is a Biodegradable Product?

Something biodegradable is the epitome of sustainability. It means that the item you have just bought can break down into the natural environment through natural elements and organisms.

The way in which they biodegrade can make all the difference as well. If they use water, organic material, and carbon dioxide, they are breaking down without doing any harm to the environment.

Most products that boast a “biodegradable” label feature sustainable materials and plant by-products.

However, how you dispose of your biodegradable product can matter more than you might think. In a landfill environment, it may not be able to break down while being buried under tonnes of trash. The best way to dispose of such products is by sending them to a recycling plant.

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Watering Your Garden
Eco-Living, Gardens, Recycling, Sustainability

Are You Watering Your Garden Right?

It is easy to understand the ‘why’ when it comes to watering the plants in your garden. However, the ‘when’ and the ‘how’ are often the most misunderstood aspects of the practice of gardening. Landscapers Sydney say this can literally make or break your garden. Therefore, it is best to understand what reticulation practices are good, and what methods spell disaster.

Tackling the ‘when’ –

Truth be told, professional landscapers tell us that there is no right time or wrong time to water your plants. The ideal time depends on a number of factors such as the climatic conditions in the area concerned, the type of plants that need to be watered, the kind of soil they are planted in, and a number of other criteria. A little trick to work around this arbitrary situation is to check the soil.

The consistency required to determine if the time is right to water your patch is somewhere between moist and dry. The right balance has to be struck between these two states. The mud has to be moist enough to form a consistent ball in the fist of your hand, but also loose enough to fall apart when you drop it. If you have plants sheltered in a nursery, over time, you get better at determining just how heavy or how light the soil should be when it is adequately watered.

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Small Packages
Sustainability

Sustainability in Sending Small Packages

If you are a small business who uses a transport company to deliver small items of freight, there are many ways you can be sustainable and save your costs as well.  Many businesses also receive goods such as supplies, so they will have various kinds of packaging to dispose of. While it may be sent off to the recycling centre, it could be a better option to keep it and re-use it for the packaging needs of your business.

Recycling packaging for your business will save in many ways.

  • It saves on the cost of purchasing more packaging
  • It saves on the cost of disposing of it in some other way
  • It saves on the cost of fuel in having new packaging delivered to your business.

While the latter may not be saving your own fuel costs, it still helps to save the earth’s resources.

You may think that being, in effect, your own recycling centre will take up more room, you would still have to find storage for the new packaging materials if you purchased that. This room can be utilised to store recycled packaging just as well.  It is possible to flatten cardboard boxes so they don’t take up too much room. If you store them in piles according to size, it will be easy to find the right ones for your needs.

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Solar Panels and Colorbond Roofing
Eco-Living, Sustainability

Solar Panels and Colorbond Roofing

With solar panels becoming ever more popular in Australia, anyone with Colorbond roofing or who is thinking about getting one will want to know whether it is okay to put solar panels up on such a roof. The simple answer is yes, but there are certain things you should be aware of before you start.

For a start, only allow a professional tradesman to do the work – and make sure they have a good reputation. Unfortunately, there are professionals whose work is nothing short of shoddy and who just want to get the job done quickly and go – after getting paid, of course. Choose someone who is proud of their standard of work and cares about doing the job properly.

When walking on any roof, but particularly on Colorbond, you should wear shoes with soft soles that will not scratch the surface of the paint. In addition, it is important to tread only on the top of the corrugations, never in the bottom part, especially if you have chosen a profile with a wide pan or valley.  The top curve is the strongest part. It is also wise to only tread where the steel sheeting is supported by the timber frame underneath.

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Expert In Gardening
Gardens

Tips To Make You An Expert Gardener

10 Effective And Practical Tips To Make You An Expert In Gardening

So you want to become an expert landscaper like harrisonslandscaping.com.au? Well, if you’re passionate about working amongst nature and love flowers, have an eye for design, then you certainly have what it takes to become one.

Gardening requires practical and viable solutions that go hand in hand with the raw resources at your disposal. You also need to have the right attitude because unless you aren’t interested in gardening, it would only seem a tedious and muddy task in which case call professional help. But if you are zealous enough, then your personal touch can create for yourself a beautiful garden with a landscape design to match.

Here are 10 effective do it yourself tips to make you an expert gardener.

    • It’s All About Good Soil

The most basic and primary need for gardening and planting is soil. The best way to enrichen soil is to build a compost pit to produce organic matter through waste material. Dry leaves, dead wood, used tea leaves, leafy vegetables waste, peelings, are great sources nourishment for compost matter. Soil enriched with compost ensures healthy plants.

    • Low Maintenance Plants

Choose plants like perennials that require low maintenance. Astibles, Siberian Iris, bleeding hearts, yucca, yarrow and ornamental grass not only require less work but also lend an aesthetic look to your garden not to mention the beautiful colors of the flowers. Such plants don’t require constant staking or deadheading.

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Gardening Ideas
Eco-Living, Gardens

Gardening Ideas for the Not-So-Green-Thumbed

So you haven’t tried your hand at gardening ever before? Or perhaps, have you tried it a few times and failed to create the perfect haven? Not to worry. By following a few tips and tricks from garden landscaping experts, as given below, you can create a beautiful garden space of your own.

  • Clean up the space – This is the most obvious way to begin setting up and planting a garden of your own. Mow up the entire space, and weed out the surface completely. Rake the yard up during the spring in order to remove the debris that accumulates over autumn and winter. This clean up helps to prepare your space for a lush collection of plants.
  • Prepare the soil – The key to a great garden is good soil. The soil needs to be fed with nutrients in order to prepare it for supporting a plethora of plant life. In order to achieve this, you need to add layers of organic matter to the soil. For established or predesigned soil beds, it is advisable to allow the layer of organic matter, consisting of manure, dried leaves, and compost, to sit on the surface for a few weeks, so that it can work its way into the soil bed. In case you are making do with the naturally available soil surface, you can dig it and let the manure mix fill the gaps.

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Aluminium Windows
Renovating

Why Choose Premium Aluminium Windows

10 Reasons Why You Should Choose Premium Aluminium Windows for Your Home

Are you still stuck to wood or vinyl windows? It is time to update and switch to the better options that are available at minimal prices. Premium aluminium home windows are a current favourite among the masses.

Here are 10 reasons for their huge popularity:

  • Strength: When deciding on a window for your home one of the essential factors that everyone prioritizes is its durability. In that case, Aluminium windows last for a long period of time for its strength and its resistant feature which eliminates all signs of deformation and decay. Again, it is pretty simple to use aluminium in constructing different shapes as it is light-weight.
  • Maintenance: People often have preconceived notions that aluminium windows are tough to maintain. Not at all! All you need is water and sponge to wipe it clean within minutes. Moreover, you do not even need to paint or touch-up aluminium windows as they are pre-manufactured in a broad range of colours.
  • Energy Efficient: As compared to the other expensive window options like vinyl and fiberglass, aluminium windows can successfully meet energy efficiency standards successfully. Excellent prevention of heat gain and heat loss through the windows is a superb feature that makes aluminium windows stand out.
  • Noise Prevention: Aluminium is much stronger and heavier than vinyl. Being more is mass allows aluminium to deliver high acoustic performance and prevent noise from escaping or entering the home. Aluminium windows beat vinyl and wood windows by a far mark in noise abatement.
  • Elaborate Designs: There is a huge range of aluminium window designs available to suit your home, office, restaurant or any kind of need. They come in a broad range of colours and can be customized to suit any colour scheme of your home perfectly.

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Maintain Your Swimming Pool
Gardens

How to Clean and Maintain Your Swimming Pool

If you have just finished pool renovations and are new to the delightful world of home swimming pools you will want to know the best ways to keep that pool clean. The easiest way of all is to purchase an automatic pool cleaner. That way you don’t have to work quite so hard to clean and maintain the water in your pool.

However, automatic pool cleaners can’t do all the work that is needed. Here are some of the other ways in which you can ensure good water quality and reduce the need for extra chemicals in the pool.

  • Use a pool scoop to skim leaves and other debris out of the pool on a daily basis. The sooner they are out, the less likely the ph of the water is to change. Rotting starts immediately, even though you cannot see it with the naked eye and it is that which interferes with the ph level of the water. Vacuuming should be done at least once a week, but daily is better.
  • If you don’t have an automatic cleaner, brush down the walls of the pool. Algae tends to form on the walls of the pool. Since it seems to grow there, it needs to be brushed off. It will then sink to the bottom where the robot cleaner can deal with it. If your pool is concrete lined with plaster, a stiff brush will be needed. Other types require a soft bristle brush.

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Freight Transport
Sustainability

Strategies for Sustainability in Freight Transport

Our world today is full of freight being sent across the city, the country or the ocean. Altogether, it accounts for a great portion of fuel use, environmental emissions and energy use.  Not every transport company seeks to find ways and means to be environmentally friendly, yet it can actually reduce costs and make their business a great deal more efficient.

Determining the strategies for sustainability are not difficult. There are many ways in which packaging can be optimised.

  • Analyse the shipping weight of various containers. Both crates and packaging materials add to the total weight. The more the packaging weighs the more your goods cost to send and the more resources are used to carry them to their destination.
  • Look at shipping densities. Empty space that could be filled with more goods is costing the company in terms of wastage. One large box that is not filled to capacity costs more to send than one of the right size, due to oversized rates and the fact that more could be sent for the same amount of fuel used if that space was reduced.
  • Observe the damage. There is always some wear and tear on boxes and crates. You need to find the fine line between damaged goods through not enough or the wrong type of packaging, and absolutely no damage to the box or its contents, which might point to over-packing that costs more than necessary.

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Sustainability

Choosing an Environmentally Friendly Exhaust System

There are multiple ways to make your car’s exhaust system more friendly for the environment. It depends on the parts you select, the fuel you use, and your own conservative mindset as a driver. The following methods can all be used to create a more environmentally friendly vehicle for the road.

Use an Eco-friendly Catalytic Converter

Catalytic converters are an essential part of your car’s exhaust system. They utilize a catalyst comprised of precious metals, which react against the harmful exhaust gasses. These gases are converted into water through the catalytic converter and then expelled from the vehicle.

This is the process of a catalytic converter for virtually any modern car, but if you want an especially environmentally friendly converter, you can buy a new model which lasts longer and boosts a vehicle’s fuel efficiency. Environmentally friendly converters enhance the oxidation process, reducing the amount of hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides emitted.

Burn Fuel Wisely

You can make your car more environmentally friendly simply by being more conscientious of the fuel you use. One easy way to do this is to buy a vehicle that has a high fuel efficiency rating. You can also be conscious of the fuel you’re using by keeping your vehicle well-tuned and your tires at full inflation in order to reduce exhaust emissions.

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