Today I learned that you mustn’t throw away your old, re-useable calendars.Why? It turns out that you can use the same calendar every 28 years… Everything is recyclable nowadays! Just so you know.
Euro RSCG Milan has turned this fact into a campaign for Italian environmental organization Legambiente.
Somewhat weird, but interesting at the same time this one. Designer Mike Thompson has created a lamp which is powered by blood. For the lamp to work you have to break of the top, and drop in a special tablet and some of your own blood and voila. The lamp lights up.
The idea behind it comes from the central question: What if power came at a cost to the individual?
“The average American consumes 3383kwh of energy per year. That?s equivalent to leaving the light on in 4 rooms for a whole year. The simple flick of a switch allows us to power appliances and gadgets 24/7 without a thought to where it comes from and the cost to the environment.
By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.” states designer Mike Thompson.
Interesting thought, and it looks cool too…
BMW has presented a new concept car, the Vision EfficientDynamics Concept. Although I still have to get used to the cutting edge design, the car is pretty impressive.
The car has been entirely stripped of excess weight by using ultralight materials. This combined with a hybrid engine, this car has the same performance numbers as an M3, but without the emissions. Pretty impressive!
Check out more details on the performance and design in the movie below.
When people grow out of a sweater, it gets passed on to their younger brother or it gets a new life with someone
they don’t know. Glass is recycled to make new bottles. Used plastic turns up in mobile phones. Over the last
couple of years more and more companies have come up with ideas to find new purposes for written off products.
Creative agency THEY designed a book for Lingotto. The inside of the book is entirely printed on paper that’s been used for test prints. On average with every printing run 1 to 2 percent of the paper gets used for testing. So printing 100.000 sheets leaves 2000 sheets of waste paper. THEY collected different types of test paper and printed 500 books on the backside of the test pages. THEY used Japanese stab binding, by which you leave the old, ‘wrong’ side on the inside and the ‘right’ side, the side you want to read, on the outside. The cover of the book is made of misprinted packaging for juice and milk. By using different packages and printing in small numbers, the covers are all unique.
For the principle of redefining things, like buildings or paper, THEY invented a new word, made out of existing word: Restructive.
A great example of creative recycling. See below for some more pics.
For me just the look of one of these Grain Surfboards is enough for me. Don’t they look great? However, the fact that the production of these boards puts less strain on the environment than your average plastic board does, makes them even cooler.
Grain Surfboards began in the basement of a home minutes from the waves in York Beach, Maine. Mike LaVecchia combined his love of board sports with a passion for traditional wooden boat-building techniques to create works of art for riding waves. Brad Anderson joined as co-owner shortly after and, with the help of some friends, Grain has grown into a full-fledged surfboard manufacturer known for innovative techniques, classic designs and ground-breaking products. And pieces of art their products are!
Just look at the pictures. These are fine pieces of work… You can buy them off the rack, but also have a board custom made for you. Imagine yourself: Whaleshark wetsuit, Grain Surfboard, waves and sunshine….
Through Coolhunting
The last decade we have been changing the face of our planet rapidly. NASA has captured this change trough their Earth Observatory. The following movies reveal how fast things are changing. Unfortunately most of these changes can be regarded as deterioration…
The urbanisation of Dubai
These people have been building like mad-men the past decade as you van see.
The Aral Sea
Once the 4th greatest lake in the world, the size Aral Sea has been reduced quickly by irrigation and damming. Now it’s only 10% of its former size.
Mesopotamian Marshes
After the Saddam Hussein regime fell, the Iraqi’s have been working hard to boost new life into the marshes of Mesopotamia. One of the few good things…
Drought in Utah
Utah’s Lake Powell was once teeming with boaters, fishers and vacationers. But from 2000 to 2005 its water level dropped from 20 million to 8 million acre-feet, due to severe drought. Water levels have rebounded a bit, but are expected to plummet to levels even lower than those of 2005 during the next serious drought.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? All these changes within a decade… We used to push the problems forwards into the hands of our future generations but it seems now that we have to deal with the consequences of our behavior ourselves.
Thanks for the insights Wired.
