Recycling a Fish Tank

I’ve had a four foot fish tank lurking in my kitchen for a couple of years now. There must be a lot of energy involved in making a fish tank, from the manufacture of the glass and the glue to the transport involved in getting it all from source to manufacturer to retailer to my flat, so I didn’t want to just throw it away without first applying “The Four Rs” as best I could.

The Four Rs are principles to put into practice as often as possible to avoid creating unnecessary waste, and they stand (depending on who you ask) for Reduce, Repair, Reuse and Recycle. Applying these principles to a large fish tank is proving pretty difficult, especially as I try to organise its final transport to fish tank heaven in a responsible way.

The tank was first given to me when I moved house a few years ago, and had been hanging around in the garden of someone else with an obsessive reluctance to throw away this kind of junk. It was already leaky when it came into my possession, but such a great new home for my goldfish was well worth the price of some tank glue and a couple of hours work learning to seal it. Its first year or so spent with me involved three of the “Rs”; reducing the need for a new one, repairing it and re-using it, and it was just the job both for housing the fish and for impressing friends and visitors with the “fixed it myself” factor.

And then…

At 3am one day my downstairs neighbour woke me up to alert me to several gallons of water coming through his ceiling from my flat above. My sealing job had lasted about a year and a half, but one corner had eventually given out and created a huge lake where my living room had been. Not about to either fix it at 3am or risk it flooding my very-nice-about-it neighbours a second time, I gave up and bought a brand new replacement as soon as the pet shop opened in the morning.

Once empty the old tank looked remarkably unbroken, so I promptly filled it with chives, basil, coriander and a few tender garden casualties to make a nice warm greenhouse in my kitchen, ingeniously re-using it to pamper tender plants for years to come. The plants hated it.

I spoke to someone at a hydroponics shop who concluded that a lack of light – despite the aquarium bulb I’d fitted – was probably causing the problems. Running more lighting would have been a complete waste of energy given the huge amount of natural light elsewhere in my flat, and the tank also grew mould all over the place because of the lack of airflow. The use I had found for my redundant tank appeared to be far better served by something I had already, i.e. a windowsill which came free of charge with the flat.

After a few more ideas failed to make it off the drawing board (Outdoor greenhouse – would crack with frost. Storage potential limited by shape and fragility. Model of Orac from Blake’s 7 – too long, etc.) I advertised it on Freecycle, a website where people give away unwanted things to other people who do want them. The first time no-one wanted it at all, and the second time although someone did reply, they then changed their mind about making it into a mini-greenhouse, possibly having foreseen some of the problems I’d had and probably also already in possession of their own windowsill.

Stockpiling onions, potatoes, jam and dried herbs this autumn I’m clearing space to put up shelves in the kitchen and have at last decided to try applying the final “R”. I dragged the tank down the stairs into the front garden by means impossible to describe without the aid of a cartoon sketch or two, and although by some miracle it didn’t slide down the staircase and shatter, it did get a very nasty crack through one side and now looks all dejected and out of place on the lawn.

Glass can of course be recycled, and the nearest bottle bank is all of a three minute walk downhill from here. It may take me a little longer than three minutes though, given that the tank is too heavy to lift and I can only drag it along a foot or so at a time. In Holland they probably just phone the council and ask them to take it for recycling from their doorstep, but since Leeds hasn’t quite caught up on this front yet my best plan so far is to take a hammer to it in the garden and break it up into pieces small enough to fit through the opening of the bottle bank.

I assume that the recycling process will remove the blood.

COMMENTS

Very Scary Slug Incident

Stop reading this for a minute and go and look at Hedgewizard's blog right now - quick! It's very much funnier than anything here.

September 11th 1973

Lots of people put 9/11 remembrance posts on their blogs yesterday, and although I've missed the 11th, I wanted to do my own here.

What happened to the twin towers was horrific, and by posting this I don't mean to justify it in any way. But 11th September is the anniversary of other atrocities too, including one that's less well known and more personally relevant to me.

This is a short documentary about the significance of September 11th 1973.

Que no nos olvidemos.

Talking Rabbits

Thanks Mousie for pointing me at the Book Quiz, which somehow picked up on my troublesome talking rabbit problem. How on earth did it know about that? Quite uncanny.

You're Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd
be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Houdini

This is my mate Dave getting himself de-arrested in Ireland - nice one Dave!





And this is why - nice one again Dave! Love to everyone trying to send Shell to sea.

Housing Co-Operatives

I haven’t talked about my housing co-op here yet, and I’d meant to. Partly it’s complicated to explain to outsiders and partly I’m too busy doing it to talk about it, but it deserves a mention because living here shapes so much of the rest of my life.

The idea is something like this. The co-operative is a bit like a housing association, a company which owns houses and flats and rents them out to people who need them. Everyone who lives in a co-op property buys a share for £1 when they move in, which gives them an equal share of the business that owns the properties. We all help to do the work involved in owning and managing the properties, and we make decisions democratically between all the tenant-shareholders.

There are much better and more detailed explanations of this structure elsewhere, so if this doesn’t make sense then try the Confederation of Co-operative Housing info. The most important aspects of living in one, for me, are that my rent is cheap enough to allow me to only work part-time, and that because my neighbours all regularly meet up to do the work and socialise I’m part of this amazing little community – how many people in cheap urban housing can still say they know almost everyone on their street? Not to mention actually liking most of them.

Real communities are complicated though, and so is running a business. My contribution to the workload for the last few weeks has been re-writing our primary rules, which lay out the basic structure of our co-op and explain procedure for things like conducting meetings, getting ourselves audited and getting the work done.

Because we all contribute to decision-making here, we all need to understand the rules so we’re clear about what we can and can’t do. They also need to be legally watertight, and the version we’ve been working with up to now is virtually unreadable and unfit for either purpose:

“Rule 29

The instrument appointing a proxy shall be in writing under the hand of the appointer or of his/her attourney duly authorised in writing and shall be deposited at the registered office of the Association not less than two clear days before the day fixed for holding the meeting at which the person named in such instrument is authorised to vote, and in default the instrument of proxy shall not be treated as valid.”

It goes on. There are EIGHTY separate rules, some with not only a)s and b)s but also i)s and ii)s. I keep having to turn the Grammar-checker off because whole pages are underlined in green and marked “Long sentence”, and over the years we’ve spent a considerable amount of money asking solicitors to tell us what some of the longest sentences actually refer to. So, it’s going in the bin.

This weekend we all meet up to discuss the new rules and see if anyone can spot any problems with what I’ve come up with so far. Next week we’ll send it all off to the Housing Corporation for approval, and the weekend after that we’re having a big party to celebrate thirty years since this place first began.

It’s been a slog going through pages of legal-speak, trying to think of every possible future scenario that we need to cover and explaining it in English so everyone can decide what they think of it. The regulators have been breathing down our necks for a long time and can’t work out how we’ve kept things going for thirty years without everyone losing interest altogether. But a day catching up with everyone around a big bonfire, sharing the history of the place and the people and having a good old gossip is motivation enough. The only instruments around next weekend will be musical ones, and that’s the bit the regulators don’t understand.

What I Did On My Holidays

Thought I'd share my fondest memories of the fantastic Climate Camp at Heathrow last weekend, partly as an excuse to throw in loads of links which also help explain why I went. In no particular order...

Two kids amusing themselves on the Rinky-Dink one afternoon at the camp by singing "Jingle Fucking Bells". With gusto.

People in the Yorkshire barrio* playing with a chess set they'd carved out of carrots.

Running from the campsite towards BAA offices through a huge field of shoulder-high dead broad bean plants, being chased by screaming riot and mounted police and wearing a summary of the Tyndall Report strapped to my hand.

Blockading BAA with a big fluffy white rabbit called Eliot, who was very happy to be there and got fed carrots by the people in "Grow Your Own" vegetable costumes. Watching people spotting him for the first time who naturally assumed they were hallucinating due to lack of sleep.

A very straight-faced policeman attending the open meeting at the blockade, and answering his mobile phone by saying in a Very Important voice "I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK, I'M IN A MEETING!"

Theo from Seize the Day singing the policeman song on the Rinky-Dink. It's about a policeman who decides to join the 365 blockade of the nuclear submarine base there, and as far as I can find out it hasn't been recorded yet. I promise you it's worth going to Faslane on October 1st just to hear him sing it to the police there.

Someone I think was called Cosmo doing Paul Allen's "The Mosh Song" on Monday night in the main marquee - much better than Paul Allen himself did it. Also Duncan, who I can't find a link for, singing "James Bond is an Upper Class Copper" and "Drugs vs Sport". Brilliant.

Going to the toilet, drunk, at about 2am on the last night and finding... a clean toilet seat and plenty of clean dry toilet roll! The whole thing was so well organised that I'm going to have to give up making cynical remarks about organising piss-ups in breweries by consensus. Eventually.



* A barrio is a "neighbourhood", usually involving a marquee with a kitchen and space to meet and sit around. Camps are organised into barrios so that people from similar parts of the country can meet, eat and work together.

Climate Camp

So here I am at the lovely Climate Camp!

I put my stuff down in a marquee and walked straight into a tactics workshop consisting of several hundred people practicing dealing with police lines as Jedi Warriors and Storm Troopers. Very amusing, especially watching the pretend police get carried away with giving each other orders and shouting "BACK!", and the (for the time being) pretend protesters reacting almost primally to a line of hi-vis jackets, cheering when they managed to elbow and shove the pretend police around and break through their lines.

How useful any of it will be tomorrow I have my doubts, but it did give me a chance to look for familiar faces, of which there are plenty. I seem to have missed the party night yesterday and tonight is supposed to be a quiet night so
we can all get some rest, and concentrate properly on training about how to make quick decisions by consensus in affinity groups on actions tomorrow. Apparently.

Someone is gently strumming a guitar outside my tent, I'm in thermals in my sleeping bag and have my ear plugs in. If we get evicted in the middle of the night then hopefully I'll just sleep through it.

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Going to Climate Camp

The cat's got her legs on the wrong way round this morning. She is actually fast asleep in this position!


I'm off to the climate camp today, and I might try posting a blog or two from there. See you there if you're going...

"Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt

The story of Frankie McCourt's relentlessly awful childhood, told with both a lively, distinctively Irish sense of humour, and an authentic sounding child's voice and point of view. Both very dark and highly entertaining - read it in private so you can laugh out loud without caring about looking silly.

Cover photo etc

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