Last week we blogged about e-waste, and the impact that our technologically obsessed, through away culture is having on our environment. One of the worst culprits of e-waste has to be the mobile phone. I have had my phone for just over two years and its all bit broken. Not from me treating it roughly, but simply because they aren’t built to last and because its the developers sneaky trick to make us upgrade all the time. Starship’s Mobile Phone Appeal takes all your old phones – in whatever shape or form of disrepair they might be – and recycles and refurbishes them with the money going to kids that really need it. They send out cute little envelopes that you can put your old phones in and send them away, and as Starship says, your old mobile phone could save a life – much better than it clogging up landfills.
Old Mobile phones save lives!
Over the course of the first two years of their appeal, Starship has raised $1.5million and over 480,000 phones have been donated. The cool thing about the mobile phone appeal is that it really is an all round win-win situation: you get rid of your own phone, it doesn’t go to a landfill where it definitely doesn’t belong, and you are helping Starship help sick New Zealand kids.
So if you haven’t got one of the cute envelopes in the mail and you want to be part of this campaign, there are a whole bunch of ways that you can get involved. If you work in an office, next June get involved in the Bring a Phone to Work campaign, where you get all the old office and personal phones together and send them off at the end of the month. If you can’t wait till June or you are an individual, you can grab some of those cute envelopes from a whole bunch of places including ASB Bank, Vodafone and the Warehouse. Check out the Find Out How page for full details. Or, if you are a school get involved in the School Phone Swap where you get your students to donate old phones, donate to Starship and also get a whole bunch of rewards for your efforts such as whiteboards and sporting gear.
Support Starship to support kids and support the environment. Sounds pretty feel good to me.
There is no denying that if we don’t improve our water useage to become more efficient, and a lot smarter then we could be facing a serious water shortage in the years to come.
Our waterfootprint can be measured in a whole host of scary facts:
6,800 Litres of water a required to grow the cotton needed to make ONE pair of blue jeans
15,000 Litres of water to “create” 1 kilogram of beef to eat
1,600 Litres of Water to create 1kg of wheat bread.
And the list goes on, if you want more fun facts you can check out Waterfootprint.org
Luckily there a whole heap of things that we can do to minimize our water footprint, the first of which is buy a reusable bottle! To buy a new plastic water bottle every time you are creating a huge 7million litres of water waste!!
The Bobble Bottle is cute as, and it filters your water as you drink!
On this rainy Friday afternoon as I was flicking through the magazine put out by WasteMINZ my day was suddenly made just a wee bit brighter.
Amid all the doom and gloom of the world is wasting x product at ridiculous levels I came across a small feature article on something a little bit cool, a little bit different and that most definitely brightened my day: Educational computer games.
Try it... I dare you!
I did a little bit of research and the game that I played (briefly of course!) was called ” Michael, Michael, Go Recycle! .” Highly addictive, in this game (designed, I’ll admit, for kids) you run around picking up various types of rubbish and then deposit them into various recycling and rubbish bins. You get points for the more you recycle and you have to think about what you have collected and what bin it should go into.
So if are you sitting at home playing with a kid and you want to teach them about recycling or if you are at work and want just a little bit of entertainment to fill in your Friday, check it out at http://funschool.kaboose.com/globe-rider.earth-day!
We all are guilty of wasting food, and we all know that food waste is going on. How many times have you looked in your fridge to discover leftovers that weren’t eaten fast enough, or vegetables going mouldy before you had the chance to eat them?
It happens to the best of us, but trying to cut down on food waste is incredibly important for a whole host of reasons. It will save you money and it will be better for the environment (because heaps of food waste just goes to landfills, instead of being composted). Read the rest of this entry »
Artists concerned with sustainability are increasingly using old, unwanted materials to make beautiful creations, sculptures and fashion (here think World of Wearable Arts).
This beautiful bird is made out of recycled, damaged CD's
As I dragged myself to the office early this friday morning and started looking for something to blog about this week I came across this
The Plastic Bag Monster
Now this made me smile, what a cute, fun way to make people aware of the amount of plastic bags they use!
The slogan refers to the fact that an average shopper consumes, and wastes, 500 plastic bags in a year. Now what I want to know is why no one has come up with a way to recycle these soft plastic bags! And why don’t we at least use a material that can be recyclable, if not reusable? Paper for instance can be recycled. Any while its not an answer, it has to be slightly better than being a bag monster!
So my friday favourite for the week is this photo and bagmonster.com which is all about plastic bag waste and alternatives.
Get your thinking hats on and share what you would do to help cut down on national (or global) consumption of waste
Waste separation schemes help to minimize the amount of useable waste going to landfills
As wheelie bins allocated to different types of waste are appearing throughout the country, it is becoming increasingly obvious that separating and treating our various types of waste correctly could have a major impact on the amount of waste that is, well, wasted instead of used constructively.
In Canterbury, we now have three bins dedicated to separating waste and enabling more efficient waste collection , and Auckland has just got the ‘yellow’ recycling bin, which means for the most part we can effectively separate our waste. Read the rest of this entry »
“We need to be the change we want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
Ordinary Joes are overwhelmed by the issues about the environment and coupled with greenhouse effect, CFCs, climate change, and carbon tax, it has become harder to communicate the importance of taking care of the environment. We are trained into thinking that being green is a crusade or a form of protest but really it is just discovering or re-discovering a new way of living that is in tune with Mother Nature.
If we have a hard look at the big picture, we will realise that the core is actually us – you and me!
So, I want to share with you this inspiring video from TED:
I think we just need a little bit of encouragement and confirmation that we, too, can make our own difference to our world.
Photo via Flickr Creative Commons: Child Trying to Free a Butterfly by Aafromaa
Final Friday Favourites for July and my last as GM of SIFT. For all future enquiries for SIFT please email
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
So here are the cool links that we have found in the past week:
Yesterday at the SIFT July Board Meeting the Trustees voted in a new trustee. We welcomed Dairne Poole to the team which now brings the trustee numbers up to 5. Hopefully, in the near future we will do a little post on her and her thoughts for SIFT but for the moment we welcome her as a great new addition to help SIFT achieve its objectives.
Here are a few cool links we have found this week:
Slow Living Essentials looks into Sow.Give.Grow- leaving packets of seeds around the neighbourhood/city for people to take – great idea for expanding and growing the use of own-grown food. More here.
