Feb 9, 10
We Are What We Do: A Bagful of Goodness?
It's been featured on celebrity arms and glossy magazines, and designed by that celebrity designer of covetable handbags, Anya Hindmarch. It costs £5, but goes for £200 on eBay. I'm sure many Worldchanging readers are already familiar with the I'm not a plastic bag bag, created by UK organization We Are What We Do. Designer Hindmarch released the limited edition bag to celebrities and it will go on sale starting next month in British supermarket chain Sainsburys for £5. It's garnered so...
London's Climate Change Action Plan
Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, is no stranger to making bold and often controversial moves - a recent deal with Hugo Chavez to buy cheap oil in exchange for sending officials to help with infrastructure planning being a good example. But he is also well known for his enthusiasm for all things green - we've covered his policies and projects many times before. This week he launched by far the most radical green initiative yet - a climate change action plan that aims to reduce London's...
Consolidation: cutting traffic and waste
The term 'consolidation centre' may not sound sexy, and little about the contemporary construction industry is. But in London a pilot program has found that managed consolidation of delivery operations can cut construction-related vehicle emissions by 70%, and cut waste by a huge percentage too. Pretty impressive? Even more so when you consider the simplicity of the idea. A consolidation centre enables the efficient delivery of construction materials from supply chains to actual on-site...
Interview: Worldchanging investor Mark Shorrock
Ask Mark Shorrock, CEO of the Low Carbon Accelerator fund, how he got into green investing, and he will cite childhood trips to a bird reserve where he still pays an annual "pilgrimage", choosing to do his French schoolwork on Greenpeace, and sitting on top of Scottish mountains while in the middle of his earlier career as a film producer. Not much about money or business - at least on the outset - but the 36 year old is successfully presiding over a unique beast, a publicly-listed venture...
Sustainable Development: Jubilee Wharf, UK
For too long now, BedZED has been the quoted example of zero-carbon sustainable development in the UK - and its many teething problems and some more serious faults have thus undermined the credibility of the zero-carbon movement. However, the brains behind it, Bill Dunster, have been turning out many more schemes since that 2002 breakthrough, including a tiny development in East London (the somewhat less pretty BowZED). social housing units in the Midlands and the first in a promising series...
London deliveries go electric
In London, we've had electric milk floats seemingly forever, and a question on many of our lips for all this time has been, why only milk floats? Why can't other delivery vans go electric too? Well, now TNT has decided to do a little trailblazing, by buying the world's first electric 7.5 tonne truck to use for its deliveries in the capital. The 'Newton' can go up to 50mph, with a range of 130 miles. And not only is it zero-emission on the road, but it has also been innovatively engineered,...
Zero-carbon building in the UK
Last month's pre-Budget statement by the UK government was heralded as 'green' when in reality, most of its measures were pretty puny. A mere £5 extra tax on flights, anyone? But one measure that was mentioned did get radical. The government committed to making all new houses in the UK zero-carbon within the next ten years. By progressively tightening the building codes in a series of stages, builders will be forced to meet higher and higher standards of both energy efficiency, and...
The Bet: Kids vs Politicians energy challenge
The Dutch may have to battle a reputation for being somewhat dull in the flesh, but they come up with the best ideas when it comes to all things sustainable. This year's edition of the youth programme 'The Bet' has just concluded. A brilliantly simple idea, it involves schools betting their local politicians that they can beat the EU's energy savings targets within a given time period, and if they succeed, the politician agrees to undertake an energy saving initiative of their own, such as...
Hybrid doubledecker London buses
The red double-decker bus is one of London's most recognisable icons. Although in recent years it has been joined by the controversial single-deck 'bendy buses', it remains the stalwart of our public transport. And now it is getting even greener: joining a small fleet of single-deck hybrid and hydrogen-powered buses, the Mayor has launched the trial of the world's first double-decker hybrid, paving the way for eventual upgrading of the whole fleet. Londoners mourned when the old RouteMaster...
Google Sketch-up: Model your world?
Surprisingly, we haven’t touched on a development that I’m sure most readers are already aware of – the use of Google Earth and Google’s recent purchase of SketchUp to model buildings in cities, and allow any user to simulate the view from their window when that skyscraper goes up. Participatory urban planning for all?
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