Recycling Boxed Wine Bags

Recycling Boxed Wine Bags

One of the innovations I developed over the summer with the #UrbanAgTech summer camps was recycling boxed wine bags. It’s super easy to do once you understand how they work. The trick is to be prepared.

Double Wall Design

I honestly never paid much attention to wine bags from boxed wine. They are ingenious in their design though. The have two plastic walls, a smooth inner bag, and a rougher, more durable outer bag. The bags are fused at the bottom and top and at the spigot dispenser.

I discovered their usefulness quite by accident. My renewables camps were exploring synthesizing multiple types of fertilizer and I needed a way to contain the exact amount of fertilizer (which was usually in liquid form). Traditionally I use a vacuum sealer system, but with liquid that was impossible.

I cut the top of the wine bag off. This is when I discovered the double bag structure. And I thoroughly rinsed it out.

Vacuum Sealer 101

Food Saver Vacuum Sealer

In future, I will only cut a small slit in the top as I think the smaller diameter hole will make the bag more stable while refilling. This will also allow me to refill the bags with a funnel. It’s easier to fill a funnel with liquid fertilizer.

Once you have the fertilizer in the bag, all you have to do is seal it. When you balance the liter of fertilizer in the bag you can insert the top of the bag in the vacuum sealer. You must not apply vacuum, though.

The vacuum sealer devices all have heat seal features (I prefer this brand). Balance the bag with the liquid and seal the top of the bag. The beauty of this is that each bag can be used multiple times.

My Renewables Summer Camper preparing composite minerals at Mezzacello.

Trust me. You do not want to spill Eden’s Ghost or Composite Minerals everywhere. They smell like death – even though they are an amazing fertilizer.

Friends In Need

So the obvious weakness in this strategy is that I cannot possibly drink enough boxed wine! That is where my friends and community come in. My dear friend Sabra brought me THREE Bags!

I of course shared three bags with her. The other cool aspect of this strategy is that it allows me to share my bio-products with my friends and neighbors. I also get real-time feedback on their efficacy.

So now I wait for my friends to test my fertilizers and give me feedback. So far, I have five neighbors and gardens testing my fertilizers. I will keep you posted!


Water From Waste Part Two

Water From Waste Part Two

Water From Waste Part Two
The model of the solar still I am building at Mezzacello.

Earlier in the summer I created a waste water recycler with sand, gravel, and rocks in a nested three and five gallon bucket. It worked quite well and I was really pleased with it. I wanted to cover the moisture evaporator in this blog called Water to waste part two.

This model was a test idea to see if we could actually create evaporated water from waste water from the hand washing stations at Mezzacello. It worked very well! We used a plastic container and a heavy duty ceramic baking dish with a plexiglass lid.

It was not as efficient as this wood box and water sealed design with the pyrex dish and a real glass lid that will be sealed tight. I will be building this one out now that I know the design principles are solid. The key innovations with this one will be the glass sealed lid and a metal drip edge to capture ALL the evaporate condensate.

Mild Success With Plastic

The original evaporative still was pretty successful. It captured one liter of pure water over two days. I think I can improve upon that with the new design. The real flaws in the original design was the plastic container, and the lack of a drip edge.

We were amazed that it actually worked at all. We painted the interior of the box matte black to absorb as much heat as possible. The plastic was not as efficient an insulator as the wood and watertight paint will be.

We were fascinated that the evaporator was both efficient at collecting pure water AND the solids from the soap. In the ceramic dish, the layer of soap solids and bacteria were left behind. By treating the soap solids with heat and alcohol we could also recycle the soap by adding it to fresh soap and allowing it to continue to aid in saponification.

The water was easily sterilized to 98% by adding a bromine tablet to it. But we decided to use the water to keep the animals hydrated. The rabbits, chickens, ducks, worms, and crickets were very grateful.

Glass and Wood

My main concern with this modified design will be the glass facing. I will have to store it in the greenhouse where it will get the right amount of sun, but be protected from the environment. Then I will innovate the water collection bottle.

The water has a tendency to evaporate out of the bottle if the bottle is not sealed properly. Water wants to return to vapor in heat. So I will insulate the bottle and keep it out of the light and sealed with a one-way valve.

Stay tuned for the results of this experiment. i will post the results of this experiment here after i have the model complete. Come back then!


Lessons in Food, Water, and Waste

Lessons in Food, Water, and Waste

Lessons in Food and Waste
Creating chicken and duck feed from weevil-infested rice

This was a day in my renewables camp at Mezzacello this summer. We had covered motors, electricity, solar power, wind power, magnetism and batteries and how they can all be used to create power and resources on an urban farm. We had yet to discuss The lessons in food and waste.

Food and water are renewable resources that most young people ignore or are completely unaware of. How much food gets thrown away because most urban people do not know what else to do with it? This is the power and privilege of an urban farm.

Freaked Out

I would be lying if I told you when I showed these young people bugs in rice that they were not freaked out. Their first response was, “Ew! Throw that away!” But I asked them to calm down and reflect.

When we ere working in the gardens and we found a worm, or a grub, what did we do? They immediately knew they had given them to the chickens and ducks at Mezzacello. They watched as the poultry made quick work out of free protein and fat.

So I asked again, who would eat these without question? The chickens! And what do we use to cook it? Recycled water from the atmosphere!

The Luke Skywalker Effect

Earlier in the week we had built an atmospheric evaporator that turns grey water (From sanitary hand washing stations collection) into fresh water using glass, pressure, sunlight, heat, and a rubber tube than ran down into a sealed bottle. The kids knew we could use this water for this task and that if we wanted to drink it we’d have one more step to sterilization. The bigger question was how did we reuse the soap left over?

They decided to use their “Luke Skywalker ‘vaporator Bonus Water” to prepare a rice, weevil, grub, mealworm and sweet pea treat for the poultry. Why not? We had more than we needed and the tools to do it!

Here is a quick video of them deciding what to do and how to get through it. All power was being generated from solar, wind, and battery reserves. Except for my iPhone, which had its own battery.

How we recycle typically trash food into more resources on an urban farm.

Even I have to admit I was not ready for some of these ideas and answers. We do not know we are ignorant or wrong until we are confronted by it. This is why Mezzacello exists.


My Mission Is a Better Community

My Mission Is a Better Community

My Mission Is a Better Community. That is what Grow, Maintain, Sustain, Explain (my actual mission) really means. It means learning and changing, evolving, and in general — where possible — making life better for others.

I originally posted this as a larger blog that included my thoughts on failure, but I decided to split that out. You can see it here.

When I started Mezzacello I KNEW I knew NOTHING. What I was surprised by was that even in my ignorance I was better off than most of the kids I had met. Especially the kids in the inner city who had neither access to gardens, curiosity, or courage to try.

I live in a community that is in a densely populated urban part of town. In Olde Towne East in downtown Columbus, Ohio gardens were anomalous and scattered and a FARM was a ridiculous fancy. But I had faith.

I knew the secret weapon here was going to be curiosity and wonder.

Jim Bruner

I knew the secret weapon here was going to be curiosity and wonder. Learning is a skill, and by learning more, we learn faster, usually. I was committed to learning was faster by adapting and failing faster.

Bioreactors and the Community Reaction

Well, back to community and mission. I decided three years ago I was going to fail forward into composting as a bioscience project. I studied, I experimented, collected materials, built formidable machines, and systems, and ended up covered in pre-digested bioreactor material — twice, thanks again to the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation and the PAST Foundation.

Learning and Growing

In the case of the bioreactor, my failure the first time was in fluid dynamics and the second time in pipe fittings. My neighbors and friends were confounded in what I was trying to do here. Why would you design something that was so prone to fail?

Which brings me to my last point of this blog post; you can’t build a community without people, ideas, good deeds, and work. A community is a garden, it must be tended and you must suffer the occasional loss and disappointment.

Train yourself to think of these experiences. Record them, reflect on them, share them. These are not failures, they are marks on a wall signifying growth.

Growth chart

Growth is the true heart of any garden, community, friendship, and indeed, humanity itself. No one says, I do not think I should grow anymore. What they say is, I want to be in control of that growth, with no surprises, and that is NOT how this game works.