Topics for blog posts

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I haven't had enough time to comment your blog posts here lately, but please don't let that refrain you from posting stuff.

Based on the seminars we had earlier today, it seemed the lecture by Nate Hagens yesterday made an impression on many of you - that (or any other lecture) thus seems like a suitable topic for a blog post (or several, covering different aspects of the talk). The same of course also goes for Hagen's texts, the text for today's seminar or any other text we have read in the course.

Another great topic could be your thoughts going in to the seminar earlier today - for example based on you seminar question. Some of your questions were great but we didn't have time to discuss them all and naturally people in other seminar groups don't know anything about your question.

Beyond the question, the seminar discussions and your thoughts at of following the seminar could be yet another suitable topic for blog posts here.

/Daniel
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Food waste

I found a great TED talk by Tristram Stuart that bring up our ways of consuming and wasting food. In the video he expose how much the developed world throw away and what this leads to. One thing he brings up which I found very interesting is that we from 2001 can not feed our livestock with our own food and the result of this is that we "cook" food for them and much of the ingredients comes from south america. To produce these ingredients they cut down a lot of rain-forest to gain access to rich land. So when complaining on companies cutting down rain-forest we mostly got ourselves to blame.

I think this could be an interesting subject that could be developed into a seminar maybe next year.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWC_zDdF74s&sns=em

Rolighetsteorin.se

In a course on design given by the school of architectural design here at KTH  one of the concepts we  as students got in touch with was rolighetsteorin.se (A theory of fun). It's about fun ways to how we can be more sustainable adopting a more fun way doing it. This one is an example about ecological sustainability:


Another thing is the "walk-panels" made by the japanese engineer Kohei Hayamizu. I belive it connects with the thought of the eco-gym and personally I belive Hayamizus idea is great:




What do you think?

I will also get back on the reply on my previous post when I've got the time to formulate a good answer.

Eco-gym

I think a big reason why many people do not choose to be environmentally friendly is because it in many cases costs more than the non-environmentally friendly option.

A few years ago I read an article about "Eco-gym" in Metro that showed numbers of how many households a hall with 20 spinning bikes could generate electricity to if the bikes where used extensively for a year. Unfortunately I do not remember the exact numbers but after Googling ”Eco-gym”, I came across an article about a gym in Portland, USA, whose ambition is to be completely self-sufficient when it comes to electricity. When the article was written, in 2010, the owner said that the 200 members who trained at the gym did not generate enough electricity for the 280 sq. m large facility to be carbon-neutral, but if all the training equipment would be used at the same time, it could generate twice as much electricity as the facility needs.

The gym in the article is not the first Eco-gym in the world but it still raises my attention because this business concept creates an opportunity to reduce the price range if the equipment manages to generate as much electricity as is needs. Because that would mean that the electricity costs would disappear. I think the idea is very good because it does not require more effort for an individual to work out in a eco-gym than in a regular gym. It could even result in, that you would pay less for the eco-gym.

However, the purchase cost of these machines is probably higher than the non-electricity-generating equipment and therefore this business concept involves higher initial costs.

The bottom line of this blog post is that I think it is important for entrepreneurs to develop a business concept where people contribute to sustainable development even though they do not change their lifestyle because many people today are not willing to change their way of living.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2032281,00.html

Återanvändning av företagsdatorer

Upphandling av IT står för en betydande ekonomisk andel för en kommun. Samtidig utgör IT-produkterna en risk att bryta mot mänskliga rättigheter i bland annat produktionen. Miljöaspekterna i återvinningsfasen bör också tas in i rikssammanhanget. Eftersom att IT-produkter är en stor ekonomisk post och ett område där det finns stora förbättringsmöjligheter utifrån miljö- och social hänsyn, vill vi se miljömål med hållbarhetskrav på inköp av IT-produkter, säger Gabriella Blomgren, marknadschef TCO Development.

http://bambuser.com/v/2799724

Företaget som köper upp äldre använda datorer heter Inrego och börjar prata efter ca halva klippet.

Global Footprint Network - Calculate your personal footprint

In one of the text we are supposed to read for the seminar the author mentions "Global Footprint Network". I looked it up online and found out that you can gather a lot of interesting information about different types of footprints we leave after us. You can look up footprints based on countries, cities, businesses etc. Sweden actually isn't in as bad trouble as a lot of other countries according to their information, which is encouraging for Swedes. But overall you can see that it's not looking good for a lot of countries.

They also have a footprint calculator where you can calculate your own personal footprint. Unfortunatly you can't do the calculations for Sweden, but you can still choose other countries and see what your footprint would have been if you lived there. It's pretty basic and you should take it with a grain of salt, but it is still fun (or disturbing) to see how big of an ecological footprint you leave behind.

Link to the calculator:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/

Link to the homepage:
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

"Clean" energy

First watch this video:

Today I came across this video showing off BioLites new product called Camp Stove. In the video, the product is said to give you access to clean energy. Now, even though I am quite impressed by this product, I am having a hard time seeing how burning wood equals clean energy.

It's funny, because at first I did not even think about weather this product actually is eco-friendly or not: I subconsciously thought that it must be! But then, because of this course, I started thinking about it, and my conclusion is that I do not want to live in a world where everyone charges their cellphones by using Camp Stove.

I guess that this video goes to show just how easy it is for us to get tricked into thinking that a product is eco-friendly. Everyone on Youtube seem to love it, which actually says quite a lot about peoples feeling towards eco-friendy products.