Round Up

A Greener iPhone.

Green cow dung.

China's Melting Glacier.

Oysters Dying.

Freecyclette

Recycling is everywhere in Poitou Charente. On the whole, I think the French are ahead of us in this regard. (No surprise seeing as they've been driving us mad with their lack of free carrier bags at supermarche checkouts for years.... now we get it!!!).

Anyway, these are roadside collection bins are in a car park in Saumur. Room for bottles, magazines, and embellage (polythene bags, etc). I even saw a bucket for collecting used batteries in the Super U.

Interesting Freegan stuff in today's Telegraph.

En Vacances

We stayed here for a couple of days. It's called Huttopia. It's a chain of green/ethical campsites throughout France. We stayed at the one in Rambouillet and used it as a base to get into Paris on the train for the tourist trail.

At Huttopia, the focus is very strongly on the environment, with all sorts of optional activities planned, plus huts and other facilities made from reclaimed materials. There's even a fresh-water swimming pool which looks great and completely different to your usual holiday poolside scene.

Read a bit more about the concept.

Also, this is good on what comes after green.

Papa's got a brand new bag...again!

It struck me the other day as I bought yet another reusable bag at Sainsbury's because, yet again, I'd left mine at home, that we could all be damaging the environment even more than previously as demand for these hefty thick plastic bags outstrips that for the old thin ones.

Let The Sun Shine!

Of course solar panels have been around for years. As the price falls, we see them reaching ubiquity in garden centres everywhere, as they are used to power outdoor nick-nacks from the essential to the completely unnecessary. However, innovation in this area continues to surge forward and provide betters answers for our more serious future domestic and industrial energy needs.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's through the treatment of ordinary windows with transparent dyes that can readily convert them into effective solar panels. This technology could revolutionise solar power and, from a cost perspective, begin to challenge the national grid. Why? Well instead of coating the whole panel with expensive solar cells, the units can just be attached to the sides. The special dyes which coat the surface of the glass automatically route the energy to the edges of the frame where it can be harnessed. This means 100 times less photovoltaic (PV) cells at 100 less cost!

Don't panic if you've just gone solar and can see the solar equivalent of Moore's Law catching you up! It's not just windows that can be converted. Existing solar panels and arrays can also be upgraded.

This breakthrough has been made by teams at MIT and widely welcomed by the likes of Greenpeace.

Read more here.

Weekend Update

Nearly missed this green innovation!

I love this letter in this week's New Scientist.

Getting closer to getting paid to be green.

The Age of Stupid:

Scream if you want to go slower!

My wife and I have a got a new game. (No it's not that kind of blog!)

We're having a race to see who can drive the most economically. Everyone's doing it. Even Jeremy Clarkson. I promise I'm only doing it on the days when public transport just isn't viable, but hey, yesterday I improved my average from 31.6 to 42.1 on a 50 mile round trip. Admittedly, I couldn't see where I was going, because I'd steamed up without air-con. Plus, I had to whistle without the radio on, but still.

Have a go! It's the new speeding!

The Cornerhouse Rules

Went to see Peter Saville talk to a smallish crowd at the Cornerhouse earlier.

He referred to his artwork for New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies as his career high, but I asked him about his biggest mistake.

Head in hands he offered an unexpected insight into the concepts of reuse and waste management and their application in the adjacent but quarrelsome fields of art and design. Invited to show at an Art Fair for the first time in his career ('a designer at an art fair is like a pop star in a movie... they've accepted the invitation to fuck up in public'), he and his team had spent some time experimenting with the digital transformation of rejected design projects. In other words, waste projects were pulled out of the scrap and given a deluxe 'photoshop' treatment, via the Wave filter, and re-presented as art.

A version of a Maurice Lewis painting was given this treatment by Saville and selected as his showpiece at the Frieze Art Fair. So far so good. Then on preview night Saville wandered on past his own piece and down the aisle only to pass a Maurice Lewis original hanging only feet away. Both were presented as art. Saville was embarrassed... for four long days.

Moving on, there were plenty of Factory anecdotes, but I was keen to hear what he might have to say about his role as Manchester's Creative Director.

Like Ray Hammond and James Bellini at the Visions of the Future event a couple of weeks ago, Saville is interested in work... what it is, what it isn't any more and what it might be in the future. In particular, he's keen to understand just how people will live and work in a future version of Manchester which, right now, is probably best summed up as mostly about 'Universities and Football'! In short, Saville suggested that 'the world will know about Manchester when Manchester is doing things that the world is interested in'. Yank a random boy off the streets of, say, Sao Paulo or Beijing and he'll know all about Manchester. United! This isn't a bad thing of course, but, for Saville, Manchester clearly needs to work up a more rounded global personality.

Before rushing for the train back to London, Saville suggested that Manchester needs to keep hold of a few more of those visionary and ambitious people who come to the city to study... and then leave.

Nocturnal Emissions

I was only telling someone last week, who'd come up with the idea of capturing the kinetic energy emitted by the hundreds and thousands of footsteps taken by employees as they pad around the office every day that there was a nightclub in Rotterdam which does exactly that... i.e. capture the energy from all those dancing feet via a specially sprung dancefloor and convert it into electricity to help power the club and its all important sound and light show.

It was, therefore, a bit surprising to hear an item on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 about tonight's opening of the Surya nightclub in the King's Cross area of London and its claim to be the world's first eco-nightclub, with its own piezo-electric dancefloor and other green gadgetry. Well, it's not quite the first as clubbers in Rotterdam and, apparently, San Francisco will attest, but let's not nit-pick because it's a good story and a useful initiative. As the club grows in popularity, they hope to share some of their excess N-R-G with the neighbours. On tonight's guest list, it will be the politicians who'll be voting with their feet.

Spray it with bombers.

Sadly, and rather annoyingly, I'm going to miss the Guardian Climate Change Summit 2008 due to an unfortunately timed but still welcome holiday. (No long haul flights this year... it's a lengthy drive and ferry to the Poitou Charente region of France... maybe a staycation next year?)

Nevertheless, it will be shame to miss the summit, especially with it coming so hot on the heels of the G8 summit which is flooding our news bulletins, papers, websites, blogs and tweets for some of the right reasons and quite a few of the wrong ones.

Elsewhere, Chris Mooney writes about a radical route to a cooler earth... spraying a million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from military jet! Would it work?

My quest for the perfect man-bag may be over.