Friday 13 November 2009

at 07:58 Labels: Posted by WanderingFamily

We've been enjoying life at Falkon Blanco for two weeks now.

Everyday, the yellow van, running on bio-diesel (fuel based on vegetable oil), goes into town to collect wood pallets from supermarkets and food distributors, keeping and eye open on trash bins and waste spots for anything usable. A business can not just throw the pallets with the rest of it's garbage, it is in fact taxed for every pallets thrown away.

The FB Van therefore provides a service for these businesses and in exchange, they give all of the wood pallets (including ones that do not require a repair), and they put aside any product they would throw to the trash - this includes expired food products, produce that is rotten or which only has a few days to go, damaged packaged food and cleaning products (i.e. one broken jar in a box, and they give the whole box).

It is amazing how much food goes into waste, some days the van comes with boxes and boxes of cereals, perfect bananas, hard red tomatoes, chocolate, jars and cans... Once the van returns, we sort the pallets and later process the broken ones, we sort the food, whatever is bad goes to the compost (where else can you see compost full of chocolate bars and gelatin powder??) and the rest is for the community (humans and animals) or sold to people who are looking for a bargain.

Oil is used to make bio-diesel. Alcoholic and sugary drinks (a lot of these come in), are waiting to be distilled into ethanol to replace the methanol in the bio-diesel process. We found ourselves using all kinds of products we would never buy, suddenly since a product would go to waste anyhow, it doesn't really matter that an oppressive multi-national corporation such as Nestle has it's name on it, though we did draw are lines and did our best to choose the most ethical and healthy choices.

Here you can really understand how affluent society is, so affluent, that with little effort you can live at no cost off the waste of others and have everything you wish for, even make a good income.

Here is Omo in her new highchair...



And us building our new ineepee...

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