When I first started taking pottery lessons around 2007, I don’t remember any talk about not washing clay or glaze down the drain. I don’t remember any instruction about studio safety, sustainability, environment or even personal safety. I’m not going to say it didn’t happen, I’m just going to say I don’t remember it.

I can say, with almost certainty, that there was never any talk about sustainability or the impact of pottery on our environment.  About 10 years ago, I started working in a university studio that required you to use a tub of reclaim clay to do an initial rinse on your tools and equipment. You could then use the regular sink to do a finish rinse. And although that same philosophy was also shared about the glaze studio, it was seldom enforced.

It wasn’t until I started building a home studio, and considering all that entailed for electricity and plumbing that I started thinking about sustainability and impact on the environment. To be clear, my initial worry was: How is this going to impact the plumbing underneath my house, or how much is this going to cost me in electricity?

But over the last few years, my wife and I have become more sensitive to our impact on the environment.  We are seeking to become a more environmentally friendly studio that considers sustainability as part of our process. What can we do now, not only to protect our plumbing, but how can we reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Although there are several things we are doing and preparing to do that is included in this awareness, I want to talk to you today about the very thing I mentioned above – cleaning my equipment and tools.

It may not seem like much of an issue, but I assure you when you’ve been using the pottery wheel for a week straight, and you have a ½ inch of mud caked on your splash guard, or your overflow table, it takes time, work and soaking in water to get that stuff off.

Not only can it be a nightmare to get clean, but it can also mean clogged drains if I were to use the main sink for this. That’s why I do not use my sink for the initial cleaning step.

I generally take my tools/equipment outside in a pan, turn on the garden hose and soak everything down. This is generally for clay, not glaze. My thought was, “hey, this is just clay…dirt really, so I’ll just return it to the dirt.” Meaning my yard. So, this initial clean would just be in a corner of my yard, or in an area that needed a little filler to raise it. And although that seemed like a good idea, commercially manufactured clays can many times have ingredients that are not natural to the soil around your location, or even harmful chemicals in some cases, especially if they were to break down and run off into the drain.

My other issue with performing this first clean in my yard is that I get stuff dirty in other ways: grass, soil, bugs, etc. In addition, sometimes it’s rainy, or cold, or like it is now in North Texas, 105°. It’s not conducive to consistent cleaning, therefore it builds up longer and is harder on all equipment.

This week, I started looking at building a clay trap underneath my sink.  While I’ve decided on the system I’m going to use, I’ve currently decided it’s a little more than I can feasibly do right now. My actual clay throwing studio is only 99 sq ft so reworking my sink corner, losing one whole shelf and taking that area up with a large tub isn’t going to happen this year.

I have decided I am going to work towards that though, hopefully in the spring of 2023. In the meantime, I am going to initiate a new system where I soak all my items in one large tub, like I did at the university studio. This will get most of the main clay off. I will then keep an additional tub free so that I can put these semi-clean pieces in to take outside to do another, secondary clean. Both of these tubs will contain water that will be covered and used repeatedly throughout the making season. As it gets too dirty to use, I’ll drain the clean water out of the tubs (the clay settles), and let the clay dry fully before finally disposing of it.

I know, that brings up a whole other topic of sustainability, which I think about that often. Although I have no current solution, I will be working towards one in the near future.