Profitable waste streams

Are you aware of a list of profitable waste streams?

Coffee grinds can be used to grow oyster mushrooms, the compost can then be feed to worms providing more worms and castings.
I can get a pick up truck of saw dust for $20. I can think of many uses for the sawdust. Biochar, more mushrooms, compost.
Kitchen scrapes. Methane digester, compost, pig fodder....

Your chat on the Permaculture podcast rekindled some thoughts I have in this area.

A good list of common wastes and uses could provide people with a nice income source anywhere.

Absolutely. Hers a few favorites:

Waste heat. Build a greenhouse to capture free heat from buildings. I. My town the new supercomputer center could heat 14 acres of greenhouses to 70'f all winter! We are working to do rhis in a few years.

Vermont compost company not only makes compost but runs 1000 laying hens on it with no supplemental feed.

I started raising soldier fly grubs which turn waste into high value protein feed for fish and poultry.

We used to get all kinds of free food for out pis from supermarkets and bakeries.

We tried feeding them brewery waste and they thought it was too gross. I agreed.

Our new greenhouse was reused insulation, billboard vinyl, lumber, and aquaponics tanks.

I think Gunter Pauli and his colleagues have done some good work in this.

ZERI
http://www.zeri.org/ZERI/Home.html

and he wrote a book called the Blue Economy

One of the tricks for us as a society is to create waste streams that are easily utilized as resources. rather than 'random mixes of gick'

I, for one, would love to see more ideas like this.

Please post more ideas about making money from waste or using the same material in more than one way to improve the ROI, just like the OP did.

Probably 80% of the work I've done in my life has involved reusing products from the waste stream. This thread examined deconstruction of buildings and salvaging useful building components. https://permies.com/t/9838/green-building/DeConstruction-Bulding-Salvaged-Materials.

Chickens will eat just about anything. "Free range eggs" were about the easiest marketable thing I could produce during the years I was involved in marketing....We would feed them all kinds of things out of the dumpsters....plus garden trash, kitchen trash, farm gleanings, roadkill....And this was before I knew about soldier flies! Those things are amazing, if you live in a climate where they thrive (hot, humid....Georgia. Here I have to replace them mailorder every spring and only get three or four months out of them) They can turn dog manure, humanure, poisonous mushrooms....into wonderful poultry food! The egg inspector in GA would take one look into the yard and shed, and see a deep litter of mulch and nest boxes, and then go over my egg-candling and washing station carefully. At $2 a dozen in the '90's, those eggs were the most profitable thing on the site....

Thanks to both answers. I liked Dale's threads.

I also plan on getting chickens and I had not thought of dumpster diving for them. Good idea!

Any others?

Ramial wood chips can be a waste stream in urban environments. Where I am, I can get them delivered for free if I take enough of them. I figure you can pile them in towers constructed of pallets with the bottom open to the ground. This in itself plus rain constitutes a breeding factory for wood lice (Armadillidium), which I think could easily be fed to chickens as a good source of protein.

In a more general way, Paul's observations that it is necessary to be careful about any industrial compost is a suggestion in itself; a completely video documented operation that could be posted to youtube could be connected to packaging via a QR code on the compost bag. You could construct a whole compost operation, or vermiculture, mycoculture (I think that's what you'd call using fungi in this context), Black Soldier Fly Larvae, or all of the above in succession, starting with BSFL. I think there might be a niche market for completely uncontaminated compost. All you would have to do would be to source your materials from organic sources. City trees, for instance, aren't sprayed. No point. Too expensive. Organic stores have unsold produce that goes bad, too. Organic coffee shops might not be doing anything with their grounds but throwing them out.

The sourcing would take creativity, but the rest of the operation is relatively simple.

-CK

This is a great subject for discussion. I feel that everyone with the knowledge and means to do so should be redirecting useful municipal waste streams. A few things have come to mind:

- restaurant and grocery wastes, processed via black soldier flies (Americans toss around 40% of food)

- waste cooking oils, for biodiesel (a la Jules Dervaes)

- landscaping/yard wastes, for compost

- shipping pallets, useful for pig/goat fencing, green building

- used tires, also for construction, or for raised beds

- cardboard, phone books, junk mail and expired newspapers, for compost, worm food, sheet mulching, filling hugels, water storage for trees

And many more, I imagine.

I read about a guy living near a peach canning facility.
He charged them a small fee for hauling away all of the peach pits from their waste stream.
He then converted them all into mini charcoal briquettes, which he sold.

On tires --- They're toxic waste. One of the most ill conceived homes I've ever entered was made of tires. My grandmother was the proud owner of the world's ugliest planters in the 70s.

On composting all that paper --- Seems like a waste of a recyclable product and another milder form of toxic waste. Unless you're in an extremely impoverished environment ( the moon, a lava field ) there is bound to be more suitable compostables available.

I've earned my living from the waste stream for 20 years. Go after buildings, scrap metals, logging debris and (probably the best one for newcomers) the mountains of free stuff available on sites like craigslist and at the end of yard sales. By learning how to conduct simple repairs, most manufactured items that you are likely to need are available for very little or for free. My part time helper Claude, grabs every free bicycle available to him. He sells refurbished bikes in the $20 to $100 range depending on quality and he always has a really nice bike.

Books--library discards, (both public and university!) particularly--are becoming a huge waste stream in the States, certainly in New England (where my sister lives) and here in the mid-South.  What books we don't pick up for our homeschools, we sell to good homes online, hoping others will value the great, rare old titles that have been out of print for decades.

Hi Rachel,

I have seen where organizations have held an annual book sale of mammoth proportions.  The book sale is usually several days long and coupled with a farmers market, community yard sale, etc. to bring in the largest range of people possible.

John F Dean wrote:Hi Rachel,

I have seen where organizations have held an annual book sale of mammoth proportions.  The book sale is usually several days long and coupled with a farmers market, community yard sale, etc. to bring in the largest range of people possible.

Our library doesn't even sell them anymore. It just has a whole wall of Free Books (in the last year they purged 30% of the library's book collection, this is not an exaggeration, it's the truth!). I assume they are landfilled after being on the wall for a few weeks, as all-new titles show up every month or two.

John F Dean wrote:I have seen where organizations have held an annual book sale of mammoth proportions.  The book sale is usually several days long and coupled with a farmers market, community yard sale, etc. to bring in the largest range of people possible.

The fire service at my home town used to have an annual book sale (just one day) they collected the books over the year and then had them laid out on tables in the station. It was great!*



*My limit was the amount I could carry. Happy days!

I'm looking forwards to seeing where this thread goes!