Posts Tagged "environment"

The Story of Stuff: Why our entire economy is engineered to destroy the planet

Posted by on 28 Apr, 2010 in My Stream | 0 comments

Environmental pollution, planned obsolence, manipulative advertisting, toxic incineration, it’s all here. If you are in any way concerned about our impact on the environment, watch this video which explains in clear terms how and why we are killing the planet and what needs to change to guarantee a safe future.

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A power station for every home? (via @deanupton)

Posted by on 25 Feb, 2010 in My Stream | 0 comments

Here’s one of those stories that seems almost too good to be true. A clean, self-contained fuel-cell power station, that could power your home. If this really works (and contracts with eBay, Google and FedEx suggest it does), this could revolutionize the energy economy. Very exciting.

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Technology isn’t the answer to every problem

Posted by on 20 Nov, 2009 in My Stream | 0 comments

I think the strongest message of last night’s Challenge Your World event was this excellent short video by Sebastian Baptista from Uruguay. A simple idea, powerfully conveyed. Technology is not the answer to every problem.

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An example of how society’s values are all screwed up

Posted by on 8 Jul, 2009 in Articles | 4 comments

The doorbell rang, a delivery man was there. “Sign here”, he said, and handed me a cardboard box. “Thanks,” I said, noticing how light the box was. I knew I’d recently ordered two new hard drives and a SATA card (to connect them into our server). This was too light to be either.

You can see from the photos below what was inside – a box the size of two shoeboxes, stuffed with brown paper, containing 2 tiny red SATA cables (which could at a pinch fit in a normal paper envelope if you wanted to). I had ordered these from http://newegg.ca/ as part of the order for the SATA card. I was shocked that they would ship these individually and in such a wasteful way. A jiffy bag would have been more appropriate, and why on earth do the cables needed to be shipped separately.

This got me thinking, people talk about how we should have an economical model where we take into account the real environmental cost, not to mention the money cost. I can’t think of a better illustration than this.

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