Build a Zero-Waste Homestead

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Illustration by Paul Kearsley
A branched drain system for greywater can help to irrigate a productive landscape, minimizing the use of clean tap water for that purpose.

Permaculture methods, such as greywater recycling, can guide a zero-waste homestead — and improve your landscape in the process.

The following excerpt from “Waste: Plugging Leaks in the System,” discusses how to design permaculture systems to recycle human waste, food and yard scraps, wastewater, and how to capture usable heat released from biodigestion. You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Practical Permaculture.

In your permaculture design, you want to shoot for a near-zero-waste system. That doesn’t have to happen overnight, but it is definitely a primary goal. If the systems you design are wasteful, they will forever be reliant on large quantities of external inputs to keep them running. Most lawns are like this. Without chemical fertilizers, city water, and gasoline to run the mower, they would very quickly cease to look the way they do.

Many of the external resources we rely on every day are nonrenewable (at least in a human timescale). Once we use them, they’re gone. Relying heavily on these resources for day-to-day operations means we are more susceptible to market fluctuations and supply chains, and thus less resilient. In an emergency the lawn can just grow and become weedy, but what happens when we rely heavily on external inputs for our food, water, and heat?

We focus here on where leaks often appear in systems and how we can minimize them, thus eliminating waste. The idea is to integrate those surpluses (another name for waste considered from a different perspective) back into our systems in some way. For instance, if we produce compost, apples that go bad can’t really go to waste. If we apply the principle of efficient energy planning and the concept of next highest use, we don’t really waste energy. Overall, the goal is to manage the inflows and outflows of our systems. We aren’t going to create completely closed-loop systems (where nothing enters or leaves), but we want to get a lot closer to that than where we are right now. Ultimately, we want to be very conscious of how the outflows of our systems can be used as inflows. Any outflows we do end up with should not harm the environment nor our neighbors.

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