Posts Tagged ‘enabling technologies’
DIY Solar-Powered Indoor Kitchens
Posted in Models, Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 26th, 2011
Source: No Tech Magazine
From “Build a Solar Powered (Interior) Kitchen“:
Solare Brücke is an organisation that promotes the distribution of solar thermal technology, both in developing countries and in the first world. They offer detailed construction manuals, which can all be downloaded for free.
One example is the Scheffler-Reflector: “To make cooking simple and comfortable the cooking-place should not have to be moved, even better: it should be inside the house and the concentrating reflector outside in the sun. The best solution was a eccentric, flexible parabolic reflector which rotates around an axis parallel to earth-axis, synchronous with the sun. Additionally the reflector is adjusted to the seasons by flexing it in a simple way.”
The Scheffler-Reflector can be built in steel or aluminium, and there are additional manuals available for the mechanical tracking system, a stove and a baking oven. There are also plans for a solar tunnel dryer and a smaller solar cooker.
Read the original article at No Tech Magazine.
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Bike Repair Station & Spare Parts Vending Machine
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on August 19th, 2011
From “Self-Service Bicycle Repair Station” by Joop de Boer:
Bike Fixtation is a DIY bicycle repair station recently launched to serve stranded bicycle riders in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. The smart initiative offers self-service kiosks on an extended-hours basis for bicyclists. The place offers all equipment needed to get unlucky bicycle riders back on the track. You can buy a tube or patch kit, pump your tires for free, and make simple adjustments using supplied tools. Bike Fixtation is open for 365 days a year from six in the morning to midnight. The first shop has opened doors inside the uptown transit station in Minneapolis, a second shop is to be opened soon.
Read the full article by Joop de Boer.
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Citizen Scientists Wanted for Climatology Projects
Posted in Movements, Research, Tools by Rob Eales on August 17th, 2011
Source: Skeptical Science
Photo: ARM Climate Research Facility on flickr, Licence: Creative Commons
Citizen Science: Climatology for Everyone is a great post over at Skeptical Science listing projects that aspiring Citizen Scientists (that is, you, me and anyone) interested in Climatology can take part.
“With recent posts addressing personal action in the fight to combat global warming, I thought it would be interesting to dedicate a post to ways in which the average citizen can help global warming by directly contributing to our scientific understanding of it. That is, becoming a ‘citizen scientist’.
Citizen science projects date back hundreds of years, with many of the first projects involving citizens keeping track of wildlife populations. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count is perhaps the most famous in the United States and dates back to 1900. With help from the internet, and a growing recognition of the value that citizens are capable of contributing, citizen science projects have been rapidly growing.
The range of subjects that are covered by citizen science projects is vast. Here are just a few of them, which directly relate to climate change:”
Read the full article by Dawei.
Also have a look at recent posts by the writers on the site about their own personal action and approaches in regard to climate change issues. The actions of individuals who are charting the changes and challenges of climate change link research and action and illuminate personal responses to the current situations which are usually missing from other sources of media, especially for climate scientists.
Local Harvest: Metasite for organic & local food
Posted in Models, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on July 26th, 2011
From the LocalHarvest website:
LocalHarvest is America’s #1 organic and local food website. We maintain a definitive and reliable “living” public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area. Our online store helps small farms develop markets for some of their products beyond their local area.
The richness, variety, and flavor of our communities, food systems, and diets is in jeopardy. The exclusive focus on economic efficiency has brought us low prices and convenience through large supermarkets chains, agribusiness and factory farms, while taking away many other aspects of our food lives, like our personal relation with our food and with the people who produce it. More and more people are realizing this and actively working to turn the tide and to preserve a food industry based on family-owned, small scale businesses. They are our best guarantee against a world of styrofoam-like long-shelf-life tomatoes and diets dictated from corporate boardrooms. The Buy Local movement is quickly taking us beyond the promise of environmental responsibility that the organic movement delivered, and awakening the US to the importance of community, variety, humane treatment of farm animals, and social and environmental responsibility in regards to our food economy.
LocalHarvest was founded in 1998, and is now the number one informational resource for the Buy Local movement and the top place on the Internet where people find information on direct marketing family farms. We now have more than 20000 members, and are growing by about 20 new members every day. Through our servers, our website and those of our partners serve about three and a half million page views per month to the public interested in buying food from family farms. LocalHarvest is located in Santa Cruz, California, and was founded by Guillermo Payet, a software engineer and activist dedicated to generating positive social change through the Internet.
www.localharvest.org
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Ethical Consumer is setting up a similar resource in Melbourne, Australia, and is seeking local involvement. KA
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Collaborative Consumption: Infographic
Posted in Movements, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on July 13th, 2011
Source: Fast Company‘s Co.Design
Infographic by Collaborative
From “Infographic Of The Day: A Tour Guide To Collaborative Consumption” by Morgan Clendaniel:
You might own some tools that you never use, or perhaps you have a backyard that you just don’t have the time to do anything interesting with. Until recently, those pieces of property mostly served as nagging reminders that you didn’t have enough time to do everything you wanted to do. Today, they can look like revenue streams, not wastes of money.
Ideas about ownership of property are slowly starting to change in this country. The success of Zip Car and of bike sharing programs in a few major cities are the vanguard of a host of different “collaborative consumption” services and businesses that allow people to monetize their own unused resources, or to find ways to get goods and services without purchasing them. This infographic shows some of the stuff that might be lying around your house that are just profits waiting to happen — and all the start-ups trying to help you along.
This infographic was made by the venture fund Collaborative–which invests in collaborative consumption businesses–and the Startup America Partnership in order to help illustrate the economic benefits of this idea.
Read the full article by Morgan Clendaniel to find out more about specific start-ups, including Park At My House and TaskRabbit (where you can get paid to assemble other people’s IKEA furniture).
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Flexible Trading Systems: Mobile Phones as Debit Cards for Farmers
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on July 11th, 2011
Source: Nourishing the Planet: Worldwatch Institute
Image: Energy For All 2030 via flickr CC
From “Phone Banking for the Unbanked“, by Matt Styslinger:
You might have a few dollars in your wallet, but chances are most of the money you spend is through your credit or debit card. The cashless system we’ve grown accustomed to across North America, offers consumers instant access to products and services—giving us the freedom to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Much of the developing world still relies solely on cash and barter transactions.
But now entrepreneurs in Africa are pioneering a remote electronic money network for the continent’s “unbanked” rural people, allowing customers to use their cell phones like a debit card. Investing in this social entrepreneurship could bring prosperity to markets that need it most. Over the past decade, cell phone use has increased fivefold in Africa. Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project traveled across sub-Saharan Africa over the last year, and has found that nearly everyone, from remote villagers in Ethiopia and Uganda to poor farmers in Niger, has a cell phone.
Farmers are using their phones to gain access to information and other things they didn’t have before. They can check crop prices before investing time in long trips to city markets, for example, giving them the option to wait until prices increase. Agricultural extension agents and development agencies use cell phones to inform farmers about changes in weather that could affect crops.
Thanks to the efforts of companies like Mobile Transactions in Lusaka, Zambia—which Worldwatch highlights in its recently released, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet—Zambian cotton farmers without bank accounts can now electronically receive payments for their crop direct to their mobile phones. About 80 percent of Zambians, particularly in rural areas, don’t have bank accounts. By using mobile banking, farmers are not only able to get paid more quickly and transparently, but they can also use their mobile accounts to send money transfers, buy phone credit, pay school fees for their children, and order agriculture inputs such as fertilizer and seed. Electronic payments also allow them to build up a credit history over time, which will make getting loans easier in the future.
The cashless system has several benefits. First, money stored electronically is less likely to be stolen or misused. Second, electronic transactions can be instant—lowering transaction costs—whereas in-person cash transactions often mean investing time and money in transportation. Electronic money can benefit more marginalized people who often have to rely on middlemen to help them access markets.
But Mobile Transactions does not have the luxury of riding off of the coattails of highly successful ventures like Twitter and the iPhone. “We’ve faced similar challenges to any start-up of trying to do a lot with a little,” says the company’s CEO, Mike Quinn. “The investment funds are out there, but we are a new business in an emerging industry in a country that few people know much about.”
The investment needed to firmly establish mobile banking in Zambia is large, and even more is needed for it to go international. But the models are there. The technology is there. The expertise is there and growing daily. And according to Quinn, “There is no better place or time to be an entrepreneur in an emerging mobile payments industry.”
From “Phone Banking for the Unbanked“, by Matt Styslinger.
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Eco Rating for UK Mobile Phones: One Year On
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on July 4th, 2011
Source: Forum for the Future newsletter
Graphic taken from the PDF, “O2 Eco Rating Brief“.
From “O2 Eco rating – one year on“:
Eco rating, the UK’s first scheme rating the sustainability of mobile phones, has won three major coups since it launched nearly a year ago.
Eco ratings appeared in O2’s shops in August 2010, scoring handsets out of five for their sustainability. Since then the project has become a brilliant example of how a measurement approach can drive innovation into many elements of a system, rather than just one pocket. Or in other words: how an organisational change project can become an enabler of system change.
In the UK, O2 uses the Eco rating assessment scores to engage its international supplier base of mobile phone manufacturers on the sustainability agenda. But on top of continuing to drive change within the O2 UK business and its supply chain, the Eco rating scheme is now being rolled out to the wider Telefónica Group. Telefónica O2 Germany, for example, uses the Eco rating methodology and launched it in its stores (as Eco Index) in May.
Coup number two is the success of the ‘functionality’ element of the Eco rating project. By this we mean mobile phone functions and pre-installed software (such as point-to-point walking maps) that encourage users to behave in ways that are good for the planet. The inclusion of consumer behaviour elements in the Eco rating assessment pushes sustainability boundaries, so we are very pleased to have the opportunity to propose this aspect of the Eco rating scheme to the European Commission. We’re currently updating the EU Green Public Procurement guidelines for mobile phones in the light of the Eco rating project, with the revised GPP guidelines due to be published in November 2011.
The icing on the cake has been three recent award nominations for Eco rating, including one from the Ethical Corporation Awards and one from the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards. Even though O2 UK didn’t win, we’re very happy that Eco rating has been recognised as a success.
We’ll continue to observe and learn from how Eco rating, which started as a humble measurement project, can reach further into the Information and Communication Technology industry and the public sector, and help to engage consumers.
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/project/o2-eco-rating-assessing-sustainability-mobile-phones/overview
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Support Systems: Rebuilding for Resilience
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on June 30th, 2011
Source: The Fifth Estate
From “Resilience planning for wild weather and climate change” by Leon Gettler:
Queensland, the state of floods and cyclones that devastated property, has become Australia’s laboratory for sustainable building, for creating resilient homes, offices and structures in the face of climatic volatility. In a radical scheme, Grantham residents who had confronted a deadly mountain of water in the floods, have been invited to apply for land swaps to higher ground after the small southeast town was declared the first designated reconstruction area under the new Queensland Reconstruction Authority’s powers. The local council is working with reconstruction authority to create the land swaps.
Green Cross Australia, the non profit group working with developers, insurers and the Property Council of Australia to encourage sustainable thinking, plans to launch a Harden Up portal in August.
The scheme is a world first. Using social media, it aims to makes people aware of the history of the weather patterns in their region, helps prepare them to protect their homes, families and communities and encourages them to share their insights. People will be able to tap into the portal to assess the weather patterns in their suburb or town over the last 150 years, using data from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. They will be taken on interactive multimedia tours and encouraged to share their insights through a page on Facebook. The exercise is not only about creating awareness, it’s about empowering communities and giving them the know-how and information needed to create more resilient housing.
Green Cross Australia has also run Build It Back Green workshops that seek to reduce household greenhouse gas emissions, improve community resilience through good design and engagement, invest in green school infrastructure, invest in commercial, government and public buildings, invest in green infrastructure projects and develop solutions for low income residents that reduce energy, water and waste.
Significantly, the Build It Back Green model is now being used by 7000 Victorians whose homes were destroyed in the Black Saturday fires. It is also now being taken up by residents in Perth who faced the bushfires there in January.
Read the rest of this article by Leon Gettler on The Fifth Estate.
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Using ICT for Water Management in India
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 21st, 2011
Source: Springwise
From In India, mobile water tracking system updates local residents:
The reliability of water supply is a major issue for millions of households in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Although water is meant to be delivered to communities via a piped supply on a rotational schedule, the water often isn’t being piped when it should be — leaving families waiting indefinitely for supplies. Hoping to provide a solution, we recently came across NextDrop.
The NextDrop system, designed and set up by a team of Stanford and Berkeley graduate students, began operations in Hubli, India last year, having won a grant from the Gates Foundation, according to a report on MobileActive.org. In order to communicate with residents when the water is available, valvemen call the NextDrop interactive voice response system upon opening their neighborhood valves. NextDrop then texts the inhabitants of the area the news that water is being piped 30 – 60 minutes before it arrives, as well as texting the engineers at the utility live data on the water delivery. Residents are then contacted randomly to verify the accuracy of the data supplied by the valvemen.If there is any conflict between the data supplied by the valvemen and the residents, the engineers are alerted. These engineers are also able to step in if the valves are not initially reported open when they should be.
According to mobileactive.org, the Hubli pilot initially launched with 180 participating families across five water valve districts in Hubli, and NextDrop now plan to go on and expand to encompass 1000 households covering 25 valve areas over the next year. Crowdsourcing may be one of the simplest ways of solving social problems we know of; relying on the participation of those it benefits. What other social problem could you apply the model to?
Read the full article on Springwise for related articles. or visit NextDrop to find out more
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Capturing Body Heat for Energy in Buildings
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 14th, 2011
Source: Green Futures
From “New installations in Stockholm and Paris harness the body heat of commuters” by Sam Jones:
Swedish realtor Jernhusen is investing SEK 1 billion in the regeneration of Stockholm Central Station, including an innovative geothermal system to capture and channel the body heat of its 250,000 daily commuters. Heat exchangers in the ventilation system will convert surplus low-grade body heat into hot water, which will then be pumped to heat office space in the nearby Kungsbrohuset building, also owned by Jernhusen. The plans, due for completion in June 2012, also include the replacement of all lighting in the station with LEDs, with the aim of obtaining Green Building certification. The system could reduce the energy costs of the office block by up to 25% – a significant saving given Sweden’s cold winters and costly gas. The common ownership of the two buildings makes the transfer of energy a clear win, but – says Klas Johnasson, one of the developers – if real estate owners collaborate, there’s no reason why the project could not be replicated on a commercial basis.
A similar initiative is underway in the Paris Metro at Rambuteau station. Warmth generated by passengers in the platforms and corridors, combined with heat from the movement of the trains, will supply underfloor heating for a public housing project, topping up the local district heating network. The apartment block, owned by Paris Habitat, is connected to the station via a disused stairwell which will house the pipes, eliminating excavation costs that would otherwise have made the project too expensive to pursue. As a result, Paris Habitat expects to cut its heating bill by up to a third.
Read the full article by Sam Jones for Green Futures.
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