Shweeb!

Forget Boris Bikes, I want to pedal to work in one of these!

Shweeb. Image from www.shweeb.co.nz

The Shweeb is an environmentally friendly, cost efficient merge of the monorail and cycling. Imagine cycling to work in a glass pod high above the traffic jams and dirty streets. And its even inbuilt with a little booster if you're tackling a slight uphill climb. Who wants to ride a boring bike, dodging cars and iPod-ed pedestrians when your alternative is lying back and casually pedalling through the sky?

Chosen by Google Inc as part of Project 10^100 for 'Drive Innovation in Public Transportation', Shweeb has gone on to get $1million from Google to help bring this project to life. And even it if doesnt, I want to go to New Zealand just to have a go!

Recycle those bottles!

I read this great new article today on the BBC website about charging a deposit on bottles with the idea that it will stop people littering, encourage recycling and save the country £160million a year.
If each bottle you buy has a deposit of 15-30p on it then most of us are going to take that bottle back. The more bottles being taken to these special centers means less bottles scuttling around the UK littering everything up and also so much more recycling will be happening. If these centers are cheap to run and situated in supermarkets and town centers, places we can all get to easily then what could possibly be wrong with this plan? It is absolutely fantastic. The sooner it happens the better!
Unless it means country-wide robberies of people's recycling bins...

As Bill Bryson put it: "What sensible nation would not want to capture and recycle its precious and finite resources? What discerning people would not want to enjoy a litter-free environment?

Start Festival

On Wednesday I went along to the Start Festival in London, held in Clarence House courtesy of Prince Charles. I was there as part of The Green Thing, promoting our new project 'Saved'.

Part of our stand at Start

Saved is all about encouraging people to reuse and rewear old clothes. Four billion new tshirts are bought every year and a quarter of these never get worn, they just hang there in the backs of people wardrobes. Green Thing want to show people that you can take old, boring and rubbish clothes and still wear them. We use reclaimed and recycled fabric to cut into letters spelling 'saved' that we sew onto our donated, unloved tshirts to give them a new lease of life.

The Saved letters, waiting for eco-friendly customers to pick and choose what goes on their tshirt

This project is all about sticking with what you have and resisting the temptation to buy newer things when your old things are still perfectly good!

We've all spent the last six weeks sewing our fingers to the bone to get enough tshirts ready for Start.

Saved!

Each tshirt comes with a little tag telling you its story - what it was saved from, who it was saved by and who it previously belonged to.

Here is my tshirt that I saved and sewed and is ready to be loved again.

Sadly there was no sighting of Prince Charlies himself although there were quite a few celebrities there. None of which I saw with my own eyes but was told by everyone I was with that they spotted someone. I think I was concentrating too hard on sewing...
The festival itself was so amazing, full of great ideas and fantastic designs - the dance floor that powers itself, fleecy coffins, a boat full of children's ideas on what they would take with them into an environmental future, the most rehearsed curry-selling man ever, bee hotels and giant corks. What more could you ask for?