Reduce Reuse Recycle Homestead Waste (6th Permaculture Principle)

How can you practice the 3Rs of reduce, reuse, and recycle at home? Easy! Start adapting permaculture principles to your homestead and integrate them into your homesteading lifestyle. Join me for a deep dive into some practical ways we can reduce, reuse, recycle in the home and on the homestead. The article includes loads of practical, experienced advice, plus two lifestyle challenges (like homework), and a free printable guide.

If you’re new to permaculture, it’s good to begin your study by understanding that there are 12 principles which guide this design process that leads to abundance and self-sufficiency. Today’s article includes an explanation of the 6th principle, which is to produce no waste.

We talk a great deal about what waste actually is and how to turn it into something profitable!

To learn more about permaculture when you have time, please read:

A Brief Introduction to Permaculture

Plan a Permaculture Homestead Layout

Permaculture Zones on the Homestead

Permaculture Principle #6 – Produce No Waste

How does permaculture reduce waste? Well, that’s kind of a loaded question. The first thing to know is that all systems produce waste. Every single one.

However, you and I need to define waste correctly before we can really develop habits and systems that reduce and/or eliminate it.

What is Waste?

On the permaculture homestead, waste can be defined as anything we have in abundance for which there is no identified need. We have “too much” of something and it piles up or turns into something that is no longer obviously usable.

A good example of this is garden produce.

My pumpkins produce and produce and produce all season until I’m left with piles of the the orange globes. I have way more than I can consume myself or even bring into the house and find space for!

Instead of throwing away this extra pumpkin harvest I can:

• Save them to feed to livestock throughout the winter and early spring.
• Process the pumpkins for canning, dehydrating, or freeze drying.
• Add the scraps from the preservation process to my compost pile.
• Share pumpkins with my neighbors and friends.

We begin to reduce, reuse, and recycle when we stop seeing extra material as waste, and start seeing it as an opportunity.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Homestead Waste with Permaculture

This is largely a mental shift that will produce a temporal shift. 

We learn nothing is wasted. We experience loss in the garden but discover we’ve learned so much through the experience – increased skills, wisdom, planning ability. Our stewardship improves through challenge because we understand systems better.

This is part of closing the loop – a goal that helps us designs systems that require very little to eventually no outside contribution. This is a goal that creates a lifestyle, not one final act of DIY or self-sustenance. 

We may never close the loop entirely, especially where people and community are concerned (and this is probably a good thing!), but we can work towards it and keep it as our vision. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” so says Proverbs.

Nothing is Wasted

• Challenge also strengthens the homestead itself. We lose a crop of seedlings to late frost, but a few survive. We collect the seed from these few because now encoded in their genetics is frost resistance.
• Time is never wasted – time is spent in education. We’ve built many homesteads and each one has contributed to our health and education. It’s hard to leave behind the built environment, but each time we do, we are forced to improve design because our bodies have aged and we can no longer labor the way we once did.

This enables us to work smarter instead of harder.

• Effort is never wasted because we strengthen. We can make uninspired decisions that result in unneeded difficulty, but even that can be turned for our good by a loving Creator.

Waste is a result of unused surplus, so it is a happy thing to identify where we are wasting so we can increase our bounty by using our “waste” instead of disposing of it. This is like growing money on trees!

How can we Reduce, Reuse and Recycle at Home?

Have you ever considered the following idea?

WASTE ISN’T WASTE UNTIL IT’S WASTED.

Like I said, internalizing this principle is largely a mental shift that leads to better habits and new ways of doing the same old thing. It’s largely an issue of vision.

Here are some ways to reduce, reuse, recycle waste into product:

1. Unused Food in the fridge and on the counters = Stark reminders to reduce how much we purchase at one time saving untold dollars!
2. Rotten food in the vegetable drawer = Compost for the garden.
3. Vegetable scraps from the kitchen = natural dye materials for crafts.
4. Dirty dish and laundry water = Free irrigation for the orchard and yard (through gray water systems).
5. Smelly chicken poop = Manure for feeding vegetable beds and other food producing plants.
6. Paper garbage = fuel for indoor woodstoves and outdoor kitchens.
7. Bits of fabric and craft scrap = biodegradable confetti.
8. Leftover waste wax from candle burning = new candles, homemade fire starters, and wax melts or ornaments.

We could make a list like this together for hours and hours! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle isn’t just a catchy phrase – it’s a mantra that equates to abundant living regardless of how much money we make!

To further explore the concept of reducing kitchen waste, please consider grabbing your FREE copy of our Meal Planning & Budgeting Worksheets. This resource is provided free for your use (along with dozens of others) when you join our newsletter family.

What is a “Produce No Waste” Permaculture Garden Example?

A garden is a place where are engaged in a constant cycle of production, harvest, cleaning up, replenishing, and replanting. It’s the perfect example of how every system does produce waste AND how every system can repurpose that waste.

To illustrate, here’s a homestead garden example of “produce no waste”; actually, here are several. 

In a garden you may have “waste” in any of the following forms:

• grass clippings
• sticks
• leaves
• dead weeds
• other dead plants
• rotting harvests
• dead seed heads
• slugs or other harvested pests

How to Use These Waste Items

Here’s how each of the items above are actually blessings of abundance.

• Grass clippings can be left in place to mulch remaining grass or composted or gathered and used to suppress weeds.
• Sticks can be used as tools on the homestead to create wattle or trellises, used for food for livestock when green, can be included in hügelkultur, used for firewood.
• Leaves make great mulch when shredded, food for livestock as autumn hay or even dried, can be composted.
• Dead weeds and plants when young can be pulled and left in place to provide mulch and nutrients and even weed suppression. When older, can be dried for kindling, chopped and composted, and to fill hügelkultur beds.
• Rotting harvests can be fed to livestock, turned into compost, or vegetable dyes. Imperfect harvests can be trimmed and preserved in canning, dehydrating, jam and jellies. Can also be left in place to experiment with natural reseeding. Extra harvests can be donated to neighbors and friends.
• Dead seed heads are ripe for harvesting – place a bag over them to protect them from scattering. Can be used as kindling or chips for livestock and wild birds (sunflowers).
• Slugs and other harvested pests make THE perfect livestock food, especially if you have poultry. In fact, several varieties of fowl – guinea hens and ducks, for example – are excellent foragers and will happily harvest these abundant pests without your efforts. This reduces your feed bill and provides protection for your garden.

Reduce Reuse Recycle on the Homestead

If you’re familiar with permaculture and the various ways it can apply to homesteading, you may have already considered the following permaculture homestead example of the principle of “produce no waste”. For others, these ideas might be new.

Remember, we will have extra or leftover materials in any system.

Also, nature often provides an “over” abundance of materials and even conditions that might go to waste if we don’t devise ways to repurpose and make use of them.

• The following list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, since there are myriad ways you and I can conceive of to redistribute, repurpose, renew, and otherwise use waste products on the homestead.
• These ideas are meant to help you brainstorm ways of using waste that can be developed on your own homestead.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Water Waste

Water is the first element for which we design in permaculture because it’s so vital to the life of the homestead. Water is life!

The water goals in a permaculture homestead include:

• Slowing the water down so that none of it moves off site without first being used.
• Spread the water coming onto our site so that it doesn’t cause erosion or other damage as it moves around.
• Sink the water so that it is essentially planted into the landscape and used to the very last drop.

Creating a homestead water design begins with good observation and notetaking (which is why observe and interact is the first principle of permaculture). To get started, get your homestead journal and start taking notes.

1. Do you currently have any leaking faucets or spigots outside?
2. How much annual rainfall does your area get?
3. Where does water pool on your site?

These are some basic questions to ask and observations to make. For a more in-depth discussion of water on the homestead and to learn how to conduct a water audit of your home and homestead, please visit the following articles:

Conduct a Water Audit on the Homestead

10+ Methods for Conserving Water on the Homestead

8 Water Storage Methods for Home and Family

Reducing water consumption is important, but a great way to reuse and recycle the water we do use is to design and implement gray water systems.

These systems collect waste water from bathtubs, sinks, and washing machines and channel it into the yard to be used in the landscape.

(Please Note: Waste water collected from a toilet is referred to as black water and should not be integrated into gray water systems.)

• To learn more about these systems, please visit The Jersey Milk Cow for their Complete Homesteader’s Guide to Gray Water Systems.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Waste Waste

While we can re-train ourselves to first think of “waste” as unused abundance, there are still times when we need to deal with actual waste product. Like:

• human waste
• livestock manure
• other potentially hazardous materials

Let’s start with poop.

Reuse & Recycle Human Waste

There are actual studies conducted that show how flushing a standard toilet can spread fecal matter around your bathroom. Zac from American Homestead has a video outlining this idea and explaining how composting toilets are a great choice for any homestead.

There are commercial composting toilets available, but easier and cheaper for any homesteader is a simple humanure bucket system. Teri from Homestead Honey explains how they set up their composting toilets.

Due to municipal and building regulations, this isn’t a viable option for every homesteader, but if you live in an area where it’s allowed, you’ll want to learn all you can before you begin. Including how to set up the compost bin system required for turning your humanure into compost.

• Visit the Humanure Handbook site to learn more.
• Also, please visit the Homesteaders of America site to see how Doug and Stacy build their humanure compost bins.

Reuse & Recycle Livestock Waste

If you have livestock, learning to compost their manure on your homestead can save the you the hassle and potential danger of importing compost in from other sources.

David the Good wrote a guest post for Tenth Acre Farm wherein he detailed the nightmare he experienced importing farm manure that was laced with toxic chemicals that killed his plants.

Learning to compost your own livestock manure (and not spraying your pastures with herbicides and pesticides or buying hay from places that do) can ensure you have a constant supply of quality manure for the gardens and orchards.

• Homegrown Self Reliance can help you deal with manure management on the homestead with their poop profiles for every homestead livestock you might have.
• Similarly, you can reduce your wasted time turning kitchen compost by allowing your livestock to do it for you!

Other Kinds of Livestock Waste

There are other types of livestock waste besides manure, too! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle can be applied to livestock in many ways and here are just a few to think about:

Overstocking your land – or having too many animals for the space available – creates several layers of hazardous waste. Too much grazing in one spot will deplete your pastures/grasses which results in poor nutrition to the animal and erosion of the soil.

Manure will also typically build up in these settings, creating a bio-hazard for you and your neighbors downstream.

On the other hand, it’s possible to have too few animals on the land you have available. Pastures without animals to maintain them can quickly become overgrown jungles full of ticks and chiggers!

If you don’t want to waste your precious time mowing during the growing season, learning all you can about rotational grazing of even a few animals will help your homestead thrive.

Likewise consider that not developing an on-site breeding program for your livestock represents your dependence on outside sources to  always provide new stock for your homestead.

Reducing is also about reducing or removing our dependence on others in order to become self-reliant. Consider how we use Silkie chickens to hatch out new chicks every year; this can similarly be done with rabbits. And other homestead livestock!

• Farmgirl in the Making has 13 Tips for Raising Rabbits for Meat to get you started.
• Practical Self Reliance can help you with raising rabbits on pasture, if that’s your goal.

Weird Waste

One last thing, when you harvest meat animals, you inevitably end up with a surplus of pelts, offal, bones, and feathers. Here are some articles that might help reduce, reuse, and recycle these items:

How to Tan a Rabbit Hide by Lady Lee’s Home 

6 Offal Recipes from Nourished Kitchen

Raw Bones for Dogs from Oma’s Pride

The Easiest Way to Harvest Down Feathers from Off Grid News

Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Other Items

You will most likely end up with scrap plastic, metal, batteries, and that sort of thing. Many of these materials can be safely stored and stockpiled in reasonable amounts on the homestead for later use.

Building projects always crop up and having salvaged pallet wood and aluminum siding can produce one heck of an improvised chicken coop!

However, plastic can quickly become a problem. We can reuse yogurt containers by turning them into seed starting pots but, after awhile, we easily see that reducing our plastic consumption is going to be desirable in the long run.

Packaging is probably one of the quickest ways to build up plastic waste. Recycling isn’t the answer to this problem because plastic recycling creates its own untenable waste!

Carrying reusable shopping bags into the store with me is one way I’ve been able to curb the tide of plastic waste in my home. I also recently discovered a shampoo bar that comes in paper packaging which I can easily burn in my outdoor fire or shred and put into my compost pile.

• We have a plastic-free challenge and more information on this topic at the very end of the article – be sure to look for that!

As far as batteries and chemicals go, please check your local dump for their hazardous waste disposal program. They can help you learn how best to dispose of these items safely.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Energy Waste

Energy is something that is on the brain these days, and not just electricity – there are so many forms of energy! The best way to reduce the loss of energy on the homestead is to conduct and energy audit, similar to your water audit.

We have an entire article on energy ideas for the homestead here:

• Efficient Energy Storage Systems on the Homestead

Capturing and storage energy in all its forms is the second principle of a permaculture homestead.

Reduce Reuse Recycle Time/Energy/Effort Waste

Sometimes the waste being created is inside us, the homesteader or homestead family.

When we work to create a homesteading lifestyle, it often happens that we find ourselves spending our time and energy at home and on the land.

This is logical and necessary – we’re trying to build a way of life, not just garden beds!

However, most of us are also living parallel lives working off-site jobs, taking our kids to dance practice, traveling, and serving in our community and congregation. These are all great activities, but they take us away from the homestead and our homesteading way of life.

I have found as I’ve aged as a homesteader and parent how to say no to activities and pulls on my time that weren’t of highest benefit to my family or my lifestyle. This has manifested itself in many ways:

1. Instead of removing my children from the home for education, we decided to homeschool for immersion-based education in homesteading.
2. I work from home running this site and writing books in order to keep my energy focused at home and on the homestead.
3. I’ve focused heavily on creating meaningful holiday celebrations and traditions to keep our family times happy and wholesome.
4. In recent years, I’ve focused more and more on creating a hygge homestead that reduces fluff and produces connection.

These ideas may not be appealing or practical for you, dear reader, but I’m confident there are myriad ways you could reduce the noise and stress of your non-homestead-centered activities and demands. 

Bringing your focus back to the home and homestead will reduce the time we waste on lesser pursuits, as well as the stress we feel trying to fit ourselves into a non land-based lifestyle that just doesn’t suit our needs.

Produce No Waste Homework Activity = Reduce Waste Initially

We begin any journey from where we are now. As we set a goal to not be left with waste on the homestead – to entirely use each material – we begin by simply reducing. 

Consider the following Garbage/Recycling Can Challenge (in the next section) as a kind of homework for this article. FYI, this exercise is taken from our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead, from the Green the Homestead chapter.

You could also try the plastic-free challenge at the very end of the article.

Recycling Can Exercise

1. If you have a recycling bin, dump it out on your lawn atop a large tarp or into a big box.
2. Sort through the items and make a list of them in your homestead journal, along with some detailed notes.

What is it you’re consistently buying and, consequently, which containers are you always recycling? Of what material are the containers made?

My guess is plastic—am I right? Plastic and paper are common materials to consistently find in your recycling bin.

• Start asking yourself some tough questions like, “What can I learn to make myself so that I don’t have these plastic containers in my bin?”

One of the things I learned to make quickly after this exercise was yogurt. Yogurt is super simple to make at home (as are any number of number of dairy products) and doesn’t require a plastic container to produce.

• Paper is easy to repurpose if you have a fireplace or an outdoor fire pit because it can be saved to start fires.
• I keep all my cardboard to put down in the garden to repress weeds, covering it with a nice layer of wood chips or compost.

If you don’t recycle, duplicate this process with your trash bag. Gross, I know, but you’ll survive.

If you start vermicomposting or get a small flock of backyard chickens, they can take care of the food scraps you’re no doubt mucking through for this exercise.

Take the Homestead Reduce Waste Challenge

Here’s what to do with the notes you took from the activity above.

• Pick one of the package remnants from your bin for a product that you’d like to learn to make yourself.
• What is it? Bread, yogurt, honey, crackers, potatoes, underwear?

You read the last one correctly. Clothes have their own kind of packaging, too.

What will it be? What do you use the most often? That might be a good way to decide where to begin.

Let’s say you pick bread, here’s what you can do:

1. Look up a recipe for your favorite sandwich bread online or in your favorite cookbook.
2. Make a list of ingredients and make sure you have them all.
3. You’ll also need certain equipment, like bread pans (if you choose to use them), an oven, and a mixing bowl.
4. Try that recipe three times.
5. If you don’t like it or can’t get the hang of it, try another recipe for bread. Try that recipe three times.

If you must keep buying bread in between attempts, go buy it. If you get sick or go on vacation, buy bread from the store, and don’t worry about it.

Keep going with your baking experiments until you’ve perfected your method and found the recipe you love. Look what you did! You learned to make bread—that’s the most amazing and wonderful thing!

Now, go pick the next plastic-packaged item on your list until you’ve worked your way through it all. No rush; just make consistent progress over time.

Small and simple solutions are the best and most sustainable (meaning they last the longest with minimal input from you).

Replace Plastic or the Plastic-Free Challenge

In lieu of dumping out and examining your garbage can contents, why not try taking up a challenge to go plastic free in one area of your life. There are many options to plastic that our ancestors used for millennia.

Some of these include:

• Wood
• Metal
• Bamboo
• Paper
• Gourd 
• Fabric

A good question to ask yourself: What’s the best thing you can do right now to reduce packaging consumption and plastic use?

To brainstorm ideas, grab your homestead journal and takes notes on the following articles:

• Attainable Sustainable has 20+ ways to reduce single use plastic around the home and homestead. 
• Likewise, Accidental Hippies has 13 easy and totally normal items that reduce plastic waste (besides straws).

Let us know how your homework turns out in the comments section!

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For more ideas on how to convert food waste into product, grab your coyp of our eBooklet, Zero Food Waste Kitchen. It’s short but packs a mighty useful punch with recipes, lists of upcycled food ideas, and more!