Waste water cleaner

Craft pottery is always considered to be very environmentally friendly.  In my case, I work from a home studio, so the first contribution I make to the eco-system is that I don’t pollute the environment by commuting, apart from travel to exhibitions.   Even a few miles each day add up.  Of course, you need materials delivered and that does mean transport, but I try to reduce my own impact by ordering in bulk where possible. There is also some environmental cost to the extraction and refinement of clay and the other chemicals used in pottery production.

The main fuel I use is electricity, which powers both my wheel and kiln. Personally, I don’t have a gas kiln so that’s my only power source.  You can buy a kiln with as much insulation as possible to reduce fuel usage. Mine is a Rohde Ecotop.  Planning production and packing the kiln as much as possible reduces unnecessary firings.  There is a certain amount of air pollution produced by a kiln, but the impact is minimal from small studio potteries like mine.

I do like to keep my work area clean, so my water use is higher than it might otherwise be, but the biggest hazard in a small pottery is the quality of the waste water being released into the environment.  A lot of clay ends up going down the sink during the cleaning process and also the residue of toxic glaze chemicals like cobalt oxide.  You can minimize this in two ways.  Firstly, only mix the amount of glaze you need each time.  This makes sense for me anyway, as crystalline glazes have a short shelf life, but it means you’re not throwing away more than you have to.  There is always a little left, so carefully scrape as much as possible into a waste pot, leaving the minimum amount to be washed away.  When the pot is full, put it in in the kiln with my other pots and fire it.  Once, fired, the chemicals cannot leach away and the fired pots are accepted at our local tip as building rubble, which is recycled as hardcore for the construction industry.

The remaining glaze residue is washed away, but you can take careful steps to prevent as much as possible entering the water system.  I have a home-built sedimentation basin installed, which filters out almost all of the glaze residue, as well as the clay particles, which would otherwise be washed away.  It consists of a washing up bowl with a hole drilled through, a waste pipe from that which goes into the undrilled side of a square bucket with holes drilled around the top on three sides.  The bucket sits in a large plastic container with a further waste pipe towards the top, which empties into the waste water system.  The sediment is washed into the square bucket.  It then settles in the bottom and cleaner water leaks out of the holes into the larger container.  Any sediment that escapes settles in the bottom of the larger container, so that the water that emerges from it has been carefully cleaned.  The containers are then scraped clean periodically and the sediment allowed to harden before going to the tip.

Finally, always use cardboard and non-plastic packing materials to pack and despatch your finished goods.  Only the tape on my boxes contains plastic, which is there to ensure safe delivery of your beautiful ornament to your door.

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