bottled water

link

"So drinking bottled water is like giving my car a blowjob?"

The question above, posed by copyranter in the title of an article panning Brita's new advertising campaign, got our attention. Brita's approach may be crude, (no pun intended), but such reactions will certainly contribute to achieving Brita's goal. More clicks. More people aware that

"Last year 16 million gallons of oil were consumed to make plastic water bottles."

More people visiting Brita's filter for good pledge site, where Brita claims over 74 million plastic water bottles will be avoided by users of the Brita water filter system who have made the pledge to switch from bottles to Brita.

Drawbacks of Water Filters
Water filters like Brita and Pur may get panned for not removing every possible contaminant, or for the disposable filters and appliance waste generated, which is probably not necessary in light of the fact that tap water quality in most developed nations is excellent. And Brita has certainly been beaten up for advertisements which suggest that tap water quality is questionable just because we are foolish enough to flush our toilets with perfectly good drinking water.

Ditch Bottled Water
But many TreeHuggers are committing to ditch bottled water. For some, the taste or quality of their tap water needs a little help. An in-line water filter, installed centrally or at the tap, is considered to be less wasteful due to the infrequent change-outs of the filter media. For apartment dwellers and those who cannot install fixed filter systems, the jug filters like Brita or Pur are a reasonable alternative. It certainly beats buying water in bottles.

Seeds of Resilience

Buy your seed here.

The Guru Wheel

There are plenty of actions we could undertake in order to make our life on the planet more “eco”. Unfortunately, being “green” in our society can be difficult, there are plenty of possibilities around that make it is easy to forget about the impact on the environment of our actions.
I have always been fascinated by the way human brain works, particulary in knowing the mechanisms that move us towards certain decisions instead of others and on understanding how we give ourselves limits...Why we sometimes do things that we know are “wrong”? I believe this is the question that all the people who care about our planet ask everyday. Why do we keep polluting the earth and our bodies with chemical pesticides and harmful substances,if we know that they are dangerous?
(...) sometimes we cannot afford to wait until we see the results of our mistakes, we have to act before it’s too late, we have to give ourselves limits. “Give limits” is what I believe sustainability toolkits do.

A sustainability toolkit is a mans creation, made to guide men towards a lifestyle that does not affect negatively on the planet or future generations.

My project is concentrated on creating a tool that helps students to develop a better understanding of what is “eco” and what is not. My aim is not to create another finished object that can be purchased in a shop or tested online, used and forgotten about, it will be a sort of “spiritual guide” that will help the users to create their ”sustainability toolkit” in their own head, that will contain all those actions that the common calculators don’t take into consideration.

francesca

the world water day

PLAY

100mile Diet

Here is my blog

The Sustainability Toolkit

Learn what sustainability is and have the chance to win the ULTIMATE SUSTAINABILITY KIT
to help you to survive the un-sustainability

"Buy Nothing day”_ an anti-consumerist campaign as a toolkit for sustainability

It is widely accepted that contemporary consumption patterns are at an excessively high level so that it is certainly incompatible with ‘sustainability’. With regard to this issue, various consumer movements have recently emerged as a new counter-consumer practice, ranging from anti-consumerism to ethical consumption. ‘No shopping day’ as a campaign against contemporary problematic consumption culture, namely “Buy Nothing Day”, provides an opportunity not only to be aware of environmental consequences of consumption, but to make a commitment to sustainable consumption, such as consuming less, reusing and recycling more, and making more environmentally friendly choices. It serves as a sustainability toolkit, helping ameliorate current consumption patterns.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27392771/Anti-consumerist-campaign-Buy-Nothing-Day
(click here)

SUSTAINABILITY

SUSTAINABILITY (click here)

MA Design and Environment
Goldsmiths, University of London
jung hyun, Park

Imagining a future with water scarcity.

http://sustainabilityresearch.wordpress.com/

Mohammad Asri Haji Hussin

MA Design & Environment

PLAY! (click here)

How green is your diet... a guide to freeganism?

Ana Maria Jaramillo
Design and Environment

Sustainability

The C.R.O.C.

Greenpeace' latest ironic campaign concering individual carbon offsetting in the US. I'd suggest to check out C.R.O.C. in order to get the whole picture. Fantastic!

Bruce Sterling on Atemporality @Transmediale.10

Preview Image: Jonathan Gröger

Transmediale is an international festival for contemporary art and digital culture which includes exhibitions, competitions, conferences, film and video programmes and live performances. This year's subject of the festival, to which Bruce Sterling refers, was "Futurity Now!:

2010. It is a year which has been synonymous with past images of the future. Writers and commentators throughout the 20th century strove to depict 2010 as a shining example of a future framed by technological progress and social harmony.

But as 2010 draws nearer it is clear that global society is neither the utopia nor the dystopia traditionally presented in these fictions, architectures and theories of the future. Rather, it is an increasingly complex web of economic, political and cultural systems dependent on the convergence of rapidly evolving technologies. With the ubiquity of digital practices and social media firmly entrenched as an intrinsic part of our cultural code, we have caught up with our own notions of the future. The future is experiencing an identity crisis.

Futurity is a concept that examines what the 'future' as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. With FUTURITY NOW! transmediale.10 explores what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates. transmediale.10 invites artists, scientists, media activists, thinkers and visionaries to ask not what the future has in store for us, but what do we have in store for the future? (source: transmediale.de)

Feeding the 5,000

How come we've missed that?! In January in an attempt to highlight the staggering amounts of waste generated in the UK's good chain, author Tristram Stuart offered free lunches to central London made of food that would otherwise have ended up in the bin...

Collapse

Collapse is a movie based on a vision of the world after the collapse of industrial civilisation. It touches the issue about economy, production, etc, things that will collapse by our own fault.

The greenhouse gamble

The Greenhouse Gamble Ronald Prinn, director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, and his group have revised their model that shows how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century without substantial policy change.

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-05/greenhouse-gamble

Seedy sunday in Kew Eco-Village (14th feb)

Some photos from the rainy seedy sunday I went to on sunday!

http://www.seedysunday.org/
http://seedvoyageur.blogspot.com/

Truck Farm

Here's a short introductory trailer to TRUCK FARM, the project I mentioned in connection with Ahyoung's research proposal. This film + food project about growing a little food in a big city is realised by the Wicked Delicate collective.

Urban Tools

The exhibition, Actions: What You Can Do With the City, which previously was on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal in 2008-2009, is now up at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. This exhibition (and accompanying catalog) offers 99 tools for actions that "instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world." Ranging from urban agriculture to alternative modes of transport and dwelling, the actions reframe the urban terrain for new modes of creative occupation.

http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/

We are a non-profit organization dedicated to reshaping cities, towns and villages for long term health of human and natural systems. Our goals include returning healthy biodiversity to the heart of our cities, agriculture to gardens and the streets, and convenience and pleasure to walking, bicycling and transit. We visualize a future in which waterways in neighborhood environments and prosperous downtown centers are opened for curious children, fish, frogs and dragonflies. We work to build thriving neighborhood centers while reversing sprawl development, to build whole cities based on human needs and “access by proximity” rather than cities built in the current pattern of automobile driven excess, wasteful consumption and the destruction of the biosphere.

http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/

Seedy sunday in Kew Eco-Village

Kew Bridge Eco Village hosts Brentford's First Annual Seed Swap, come along and swap saved or surplus seeds, there will also be a wide range of vegetable and flower seeds. Don't worry if you don't have any seeds to swap as all seeds will be available for a small donation. Storytelling for children from 12.30-1.00pm. You will also find information, gardening related stalls, and refreshments.

http://www.seedysunday.org/index.aspx

From Consumerism to Sustainability

The Worldwatch Institute has a new report, 'State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures,' that may be of interest to some of you currently researching consumerism. The core focus of the report is on shifts from consumerism to sustainability. Free chapters of select sections are available to download here.

Imagine life in 20 or 30 years...

As climate change touches every aspect of our lives, how will it change us? How will we adapt? Living Climate Change is a devoted space for the most defining design challenge of our time. It's also a place to support fresh thinking and share provocative ideas about the future.

http://livingclimatechange.com/