Issue #4 june 2009
A British Council green champions publication
Planet Post Let’s Change the World Together
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C O N S U M P T IO N
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G R E E C E - M O N T H LY E - N E W S L E T T E R
2 1 st C e n t u r y ing for the World chang
Alex Steffen Looks Into Our Material World
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ur things define us. What we buy, what we use, what we keep and throw away, what we waste and what we save: the stuff that surrounds us and flows through our lives is a key indicator of the kinds of lives we’re living. To be an affluent twenty-first-century person is to float on a sea of material objects - each with its own history and future. They may be hidden from our eyes, but in practical terms, those histories and futures tend to be the most important aspects of the stuff we own. The moment we tear the wrapper from a new toy, that toy is already at the end of a sweeping story involving the mining of metals, the pumping of oil, the operation of huge factories, the shipping of cargo containers, the printing of packaging materials, the purchase of advertising, the careful arranging of store shelves, and the final drive home. Simply buying, say, a new laptop connects us with a web of activity that spans the planet. Another story begins when we throw away our old laptop. It may find itself on a quick trip to the local dump, where it will lie, buried beneath a mountain of rubbish, corroding and slowly leaking toxic chemicals for hundreds of years. It might, on the other hand, be shipped off to China, where its circuit boards will be stripped out and where poorly paid workers will extract by hand the valuable metals they contain. Parts of the laptop’s titanium body and may be sold as scrap and melted down for other purposes. Much of the rest will wind up in an open dump, where children will pick through the dissected electronic remains. What’s true for our new laptop is true for every products we buy: what we actually purchase from the store, as sustainable-design expert William McDonough points out in his iconic book Cradle to Cradle, is just the tip of a vast material iceberg, a gigantic pyramid of extracted resources and burnt fuel, toxic waste, and sweatshop labour. Similarly, our use of a product only marks the start of a new cycle - the product will spend most of its time decaying in a dump somewhere. A Styrofoam carton may only spend fifteen minutes holding the Chinese food we have for lunch, but it could easily spend a hundred years decomposing in some rubbish heap. The first problem with the secret life of our stuff is it hides from us the consequences of our actions. The second problem is, most of the time those consequences are not pretty. The mountains of waste that telescope out from us before we buy something and after we throw it away choke the planet with deadly poisons, endanger our health,
GREEN CHAMPIONS HEADING TOWARDS LEVEL 2 The Green Champions are pleased to announce that they are on the road to reaching level 2 status according to the documentation set out by the British Council. It is their hope that they will reach level 5 within three years and are currently looking into implementing this strategy. This will ensure that they have taken every measure set out to be a new green BC!
A Greener London? London mayor Boris Johnson is using the city’s 2012 Olympics as the motivation and the deadline to make it the “cleanest, greenest city on earth.” Beyond the Olympics however, he is committed to reducing the city’s emissions by 60% in 2025 by retrofitting public buildings to increase energy efficiency and creating bicycle super-highways around the city, switching in low-carbon vehicles for the city’s old, carbon-spewing diesel buses, and replacing their diesel charged taxi fleet with electric vehicles.
h t n o M This
5th June 2009 World Environment Day The theme for this year’s World Environment Day (WED) is, ‘Your Planet needs you - UNite to Combat Climate Change’. It reflects the urgency for nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in Copenhagen some 180 days later in the year, and the links with overcoming poverty and improved management of forests.
YiaYia makes way for a french chef for a summer treat this month - Check out page 2
wreck natural systems (sailors thousands of miles out to sea report gliding through vast floating rafts of rubbish), and force our fellow human beings to work in conditions many of us would never accept for ourselves. The system today obliges us to take part in creating a mountain of troubles for the world every time we plop down our credit cards. However, changes are happening; the things we live with every day are evolving, becoming lighter on the planet, fairer to people everywhere, safer for our health. There are already products on the shelves and in the showrooms that can help us do better, help us turn the mountain of waste we create today into a small hill tomorrow. But why stop there? We now know more than ever about how to see the hidden lives of things. We now have access to all sorts of information about products’ life cycles - information that gives us the ability to make better choices. More important, as the once arcane information about everything from materials’ toxicity to engines’ A CHILD IN AN ELECTRONICS DUMP efficiency have come out into the open, a new wave of empowered designers is emerging, and they are CHINA bent on shrinking our mountainous impacts into ecological molehills. The changes rippling through the fields of art, design, engineering, material science, and biology are nothing short of revolutionary. Design tools, especially software, are getting cheaper, more powerful, and easier to use, and collaborative models and new thinking are bringing people together in new ways, enabling them to solve problems using approaches undreamed of a decade ago. Science is unlocking nature’s secrets, allowing us to mimic nature’s grace, strength, and ecological integrity in everything from product design to industrial systems. Art and technology now inform each other in ways previously unseen, revealing new vistas of possibility. In every field that touches on the conceptualization, manufacturing, and use of stuff, powerful combinations of transparent information, ecological understanding, and advancing technology are unleashing forces for change. Because of these forces, a more radical evolution in design is under way, and a new generation of stuff is emerging. Imagine things that use minimal energy, that are made with no toxic chemicals, that are completely recyclable, that hurt no-one - not KILL YOUR PHANTOMS even nature - but that perform better and last longer than what we have today. These products still live mostly on the computer screens of cutting-edge You may think that when you turn designers, but that’s changing quickly. And we have the power to make it change more an appliance off, it is, in fact, off. quickly still. We may not all be designers, but we are all design consumers. By voting But most of your household with our euros and showing that we demand smarter stuff - that we insist on quality appliances feature a clock, or without guilt - and that we’re willing to walk the talk at the checkout counter, we can digital timer, or a remote control help spur this transformation. etc. They are still using electricity We have the power to choose the world we live in, and through our purchasing so make sure they are switched off decisions, we reveal that world every day. - Alex Steffen - $om World Changing and unplugged!
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Prep Mak Time: 3 0 es:10 0 pi minute s eces
C he f Ek o Log i q ue ’ s O r g ani c
Chocolate Dipped Fruit
100g Organic milk chocolate, 100g organic white chocolate, 100g organic dark orange chocolate, 12 organic strawberries (with stems), 2 organic kiwi fruit (sliced), 12 organic cherries (with stalks), 1 organic pineapple (cut into triangular pieces), 2 organic bananas (sliced at an angle) and other fruit of your liking. Melt the three chocolates separately over bain maries.. Take extra care not to overheat the chocolate, try just putting the bowl over boiled water off the heat. Leave the chocolate to cool for five minutes.
The Ancient Maya had a Cocoa god. They used chocolate it in the place of blood in rituals (thank goodness!) Any suggestions for The Planet Post? Email: michael.pazinas@britishcouncil.gr
Dip the fruit into the chocolate and leave on a wire rack to cool. The chocolate will lose its shine if put in the fridge.