Feeding two birds with one scone

Hey all! I'm a little pressed for time again, so the main body of the newsletter is going to be a proposal I needed to put together for a community recycling center. But first, here's the calendar of events, since there are a few notable ones this weekend:

Events coming up:

• Friday, noon @ the Weathervane - Dance for Democracy! Come dance with your neighbors to everything from 1890s labor songs to the latest underground Minneapolis hip-hop.
• Friday, 4-8pm @ the Artisan Market - We'll be open during Cruz'in, and I'll be working on prepping some reclaimed fabric for shibori dyeing. So if you want to learn more about shibori, or you just want somewhere to hang out on a Friday night, come join us.
• Saturday, 9am-2pm @ the Artisan Market - Our normal Saturday Market hours! Come browse the handmade goods in the shop, or do crafting of your own in the workshop! We've got half a dozen projects we can teach you, or bring one of your own.
• Saturday, 5-10pm @ 6427 Simonelli Road in Whitehall - We've got a booth at the White Lake Honey Festival! We'll have most of the projects we have at the workshop, as well as our full assortment of zines and flyers, and a limited selection of baskets, tshirts, and other products from the shop.
• Sunday, all day - Hiding in bed to recover from all the peopling.

What We Could Build: Recycling Edition

We need more space if we're going to be able to expand our recycling programs, so I've been putting together a plan for turning a couple of acres in the Industrial Park into a community recycling center. It started out as "what if we put some shipping containers on a vacant lot?" but as I've procrastinated about writing up an actual proposal, the idea has coalesced into a more comprehensive plan.

One of our major principles in Montague Commoners is to start small and grow through iteration. It's easy to get carried away by possibilities, but it's hard to plan out the details of a big project until you've tested your ideas on a smaller scale.

We would start with something kind of like the Artisan Market, but focused on workshop space instead of retail sales. We would get a few sheds from Mast Mini-Barns and set them up as workshops for sorting, processing, and storing recycled materials. To start, I'm thinking one for electronics, one for plastics, one for fabric, one for the useful container library, and one for miscellaneous storage.

Over time, as people come forward with additional recycling projects that they want to try, or new community needs emerge, we can add additional sheds to make room. Eventually I would love to have a ring of 10-12 maker-space sheds with sheltered outdoor workspace in the middle so that people can spread out and collaborate as needed.

Meanwhile, given the giant amounts of recyclable material going to waste even in a small town like ours, it's not realistic to try to handle all of it on a volunteer/community basis when most people have bills to pay. That's why this plan also includes [ominous thunder] a commercial component.

I normally try to stay away from the Green Capitalism world, because for the most part it's just the same wolf wearing a different sheep-skin, and I think we'd be a lot better off getting away from "how can we generate investment income for rich people" as a framework for distributing society's resources. But in the meantime, since the investment world does control basically all of the resources, starting a for-profit recycling company would open up a lot of funding options for buying machinery and offering paid employment.

That's why Stage 2 of the plan includes a light industrial building, where we could take excess material that the maker-spaces couldn't handle, and process it into a form that we can sell back into the larger marketplace. Much of the difficulty in plastics recycling comes from the "mixed stream" recycling systems that create expensive sorting headaches in large scale facilities. A container-load of mixed plastics is something that the Transfer Station has to pay to have hauled away. But once that same load of plastics has been sorted by resin type and color, and then properly pelletized, it can worth $5-10/lb. We can use that gap to create good-paying local jobs, increase the range of materials that can be recycled locally, and save all our milk jugs a trip to Indiana.

It's getting late, so I'll save the rest of the details for another time, but I think it's an idea with legs, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Recommendation Corner

It's 2083. A generation ago, the watersheds of the world rose up against the corporations, and though the climate is still badly damaged, it's starting to show signs of repair. People are taking care of each other, and the world around them. Then, the aliens show up to save us...

I kept seeing A Half-Built Garden on lists of solarpunk/hopepunk fiction, and I'm glad that I finally gave it a try. As with a lot of solarpunk books, there's a heavy emphasis on worldbuilding, and trying to solve the practical problems that a post-capitalist world might present. If you're after a fast-paced page-turner, this might not be the book for you. But if you're in the mood for a mostly-gentle exploration of another way the world could be, it's well worth a read. And if you're an H.P. Lovecraft fan, Emrys also has a series of novels set in that universe, but told from the perspective of a daughter of Innsmouth...

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I decided to get a little experimental this week, and while it didn't work out quite the way I had it in my head, I'm glad I gave it a try.

Hope you have a good weekend, and if I don't see you around town I'll see you back here next week.

Pre-meme-ium Content

Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working (and it finally should be), free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.