The Sun Jar : A Fun Solar Lamp
It looks like a Jam Jar, but this light hearted gadget is actually a solar lamp. Sucking up the sun’s rays, through a small solar panel concealed beneath the opaque lid. The jar was designed by a guy called Tobias Wong and just like a jam jar it is perfectly waterproof. Making it ideal for use inside or out.
I had one of these given to me as a present. They are rather fun, and it has provid
ed an unobtrusive light on a few night time fishing trips over the last few months. Over the summer I have plans to take it camping. I think it’s waterproofness will be perfect for the British summer.
To be honest, while the Sun Jar is a fun gadget it doesn’t give off enough light to be anything, other than an ambient light. But what’s wrong with that, after all that is what a tea light does, and it does give off 5 hours of light from a full charge.
Sun Jars are available in a number of countries including the USA and UK and come in 3 different light colours, blue, orange and white. Try searching for ‘Sun Jar’ using your favourite search engine.
Summary: A solar gadget which makes a good eco talking point, but could be improved if the manufacturers used recycled glass.
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How To Create A Energy Efficient Computer
Wanting to make your computer faster without buying a new computer? Well there are several things you can do.
The first thing and best thing is to upgrade your memory. Before buying new memory check what kind of memory is in your computer/laptop so you don’t buy the wrong memory and also check your computers manual to see what the maximum size of memory your computer can handle. If you are unsure what memory you need try asking a someone that knows about computers or try a local computer shop. There are many places you can buy memory from places like local dealers to hundreds of online places like tigerdirect and newegg or E-bay.
Next you should get the latest patches, drivers, security updates from Microsoft or if you own a mac make sure that you run software update. Also make sure that you download other drivers that were not downloaded by Microsoft or Macintosh that you may need which can be downloaded directly from the manufactures web page. Next you should remove programs that you rarely use or never use by accessing add/remove programs by going to Start>Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs and also you should remove any unwanted files that are taking up unnecessary space. Next thing after downloading updates and removing unwanted items is to defrag your computer. If you have never defraged your computer in a long time it could take a few hours depending on your system and hard drive size. To accessing Defrag click Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter and choose the drive you want to defrag.
Next monitor should have the brightness on your monitor turned down all the way or down enough so you can still read what is on your monitor. If you are still using a CRT monitor you should go out and buy a Energy Star flat panel monitor and properly dispose of your CRT monitor at a nearby recycling program that takes CRT monitors (some places will take your CRT monitor for a small fee).
Also make sure that your computer is plugged into a outlet strip and make sure that you turn off the switch when not using the computer and turn it on when you do use your computer (Your computer still uses power when not turned on). Lastly if you use window 2000, XP or Vista your computer should be able to use hibernation. Hibernation makes your start up time drop dramatically and extends the hard drive life span. For more information on how to configure this XP users, Win 2000 users. For windows vista it should be already enabled by default (I’m unsure about hibernation in vista since I have never used vista).
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Food and Climate Change Connection by Charles on May 28th, 2008
What do Food and Climate Change have in common? Well if you look at this Cars=13% of all carbon emissions and Livestock=18% of all carbon emissions eating less meat or even going Vegetarian/Vegan is better than switching to a hybrid car and even better if you go vegan and own a hybrid!
About 5 months ago I went Vegan and have loved every last bit of it and I feel great being a vegan so I decided to create this post since it is "Green".
Recycling your Computer(s) by Charles on January 30th, 2008
Looking forward or wanting to get rid of one of your old computers? There are several ways you can do go get rid of your old computer(s) First you should know that everything electronic contains harmful chemicals and materials that can be recycled like glass, plastic, gold, copper, aluminum.
Labels are confusing and can be misleading... by Charles on January 1st, 2008
A few days a go I had found a article in Good Housekeeping which talked about what are these fancy names we put on products in the store like "natural" and "no CFC's" and what they really mean to the consumer.
Guest Editor: Scott James - 5 Easy & Inexpensive Guerrilla Marketing Strategies for Fair Trade Organizations
Guerrilla marketing is one of the most effective methods available to small businesses and nonprofit organizations for increasing sales or expanding the reach of your cause. These unconventional techniques are designed to produce maximum results using minimal resources.
Today, the Internet provides the best medium to use guerrilla marketing in fast and easy ways. The most effective strategies are:
1. Email Marketing
You must give visitors to your website a reason to leave their email address and give you permission to continue communicating with them. Offer a free subscription to a newsletter about your niche within the Fair Trade movement or provide another type of bonus.
Use an autoresponder service to capture visitor sign-ups and send out follow-up messages and newsletters to your list. For my company that sells Fair Trade soccer balls online, I route our emails through the free tools available at Gmail (look at their Vacation Settings for the autoresponder functionality). Be sure to provide valuable information, not just blatant advertising. By developing a rapport with your readers, you’ll build a larger and larger list of responsive subscribers.
2. Blogging
Blogging has taken the online world by storm. Blogs (short for “web logs”) are dynamically editable websites people use to talk about topics important to them.
Post to your blog as often as you want and include links pointing to your website. This frequently changing, unique content and the numerous incoming links are extremely favorable to the search engines.
You can use Blogger.com to set up an attractive template for your blog and post messages right away. The best part, it’s free. I personally use WordPress – an open-source platform with lots of community support – on our blog at www.fairtradesports.com, as well as FeedBurner to make subscribing to our blog fast and easy for our website visitors.
3. Forum Marketing
Forums give people a place online to congregate and talk about what interests them. To find forums in your niche, just Google “[keyword] forum” and see what you get.
Once you sign up for a forum, post messages regularly. This is a great way to build relationships. Post questions. Answer questions. Tell people where to find good information. Putting blatant advertising in your posts is against the rules. But you are allowed to put a link to your website in your forum signature. Consider changing your signature based on the forum to which you are contributing. For example, this is my standard signature for any forum related to Fair Trade:
- Scott James
Fair Trade Sports
Blog: www.fairtradesports.com
Fair Trade soccer balls!
I use a different signature for forums related to the eco-aspects of our sports balls, my work with the abolitionist Not For Sale Campaign, or my work with the sustainable MBA school, Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
4. Direct Link Building
Search engines – Google, in particular – favor pages with lots of incoming links, both one-way and two-way links, because it increases your website’s “popularity” across the Internet.
A simple example of one-way linking is the kind of link you get when you submit an comment on someone else’s blog. Your comment can have a link to your site in it, and the comment can be picked up by related websites and ezines if the topic is interesting.
For two-way links, you can contact other website owners within the Fair Trade movement and ask to trade links. Or, just Google “[keyword] trade links,” and you’ll get back a bunch of sites that are offering to do a link exchange with you. Then, you can add them to a section on your site titled “Related Links,” “Resource Center,” or something similar. It’s that simple.
Go through the list and start asking if you can trade links. Slow and steady wins the race. Do a little every day and pretty soon, you’ll grow your links a lot. The key is to reach out to others with authentic sites doing work to further the Fair Trade movement.
5. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are wildly popular with people under 25, and several (like MySpace, Facebook, and Ning) have become some of the most visited sites on the web.
Squidoo.com is different from other sites because you can sell blatantly without worrying about being shut down.
Squidoo lets you create what’s called a lens, which is an information portal about your topic. The secret is to provide helpful information for people in your niche. Along the way, you can point them to your website, getting you laser-targeted traffic. We made one to alert Squidoo readers of Fair Trade products available on the web (http://www.squidoo.com/shopfairtrade).
By implementing these guerrilla marketing strategies, you will be spreading the word about your product, your organization and your cause across the Internet in ways that will have both an immediate impact and a long-term effect for years to come.
by Scott James
Founder, Fair Trade Sports
Bringing you eco-certified Fair Trade soccer balls and more!
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Guest Editor: Simon Mallett - Is the UK Government scamming us on its Green Credentials? by Guest Editor on July 3rd, 2008
One of the big problems in taking action to change things is knowing where you are to start with.
Guest Editor: David Fletcher - Too Rich to Care? by Guest Editor on June 15th, 2008
One morning I was walking to work in London when I passed a woman unlocking her shop on Old Bond Street.
Guest Editor: David Hayes - Social Networking for change by Guest Editor on June 13th, 2008
It’s safe to say that the use of social networking sites worldwide has exploded in the past year, with popular sites seeing total visits increase by as much as 270 percent, according to a recent study by ComScore Inc.
Managing Change : A Blue Print for an ‘Ecolution’
How many times have you witnessed your workplace changing? A few days ago I sat and participated in a workshop on change management. The very words ‘change management’ evoke all sorts of cynicism in me. I’ve seen my fair share of departmental re-structures in both the private and public sector. ‘Change management. What feeling do those words evoke?’ the consultant asks. ‘Sham’ is usually my first unconscious first reaction. However change management is more about trying to help people come together, and sort things out in a way everyone wants to. If only they told you that in the first place.
As I sat there, it dawned on me that maybe society needs some help with Climate Change. Maybe society needs a little bit of Change Management.
Prosci came up with a change management model called ADKAR. They call it a model, but some may call it common sense, a Tao or even a bit of advice.
Apparently these five steps enable you to recognise what you need to do in life, to survive change (or at least make yourself feel better about it).
1. Awareness – ‘For things to make sense, you’ve got to know why change is needed.‘
- Famine, mass immigration, food crashes, economic risk, disease caused by climate change. If you think Climate Change is a left-wing conspiracy, then you really haven’t read enough. I’m not being nasty, it’s just simply the way it is.
2. Desire – ‘You must have the desire to support and participate in change‘
- As James Lovelock said in The Guardian(1) ‘Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the Second World War was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do… they had a sense of purpose - that’s what people want.” At the moment people are in denial, because they can’t relate to catastrophic climate change on a personal level. They won’t make environmental improvements until the waves are at the doorstep.
3. Knowledge – ‘Once the need for change is realised, you wonder how to change, and minimise the impact on your own life’
- GreenGirlsGlobal, GreenGuysGlobal, and all those leading the environmental on-line ‘ecolution’ can help increase your knowledge. Information about making environmental improvements has never been so widely available.
4. Ability – ‘You need the ability to implement new skills and behaviours. Can you rise to the challenge? ‘
- Recycling, growing, building, helping, engineering, discovering, complaining, campaigning. There’s something for everyone
5. Reinforcement – ‘Making change, making history. It can only happen with reinforcement‘
Once you’ve cracked all the previous points, change large enough to save the world can only happen, if you help others through the process. Don’t forget, not everyone surfs the Internet.
We are headed towards a 2-degree rise in global temperatures. IPCC scientists have told us that this is the limit of safety (2). For those of you that think this will make the summers nicer, think again. Reports from the Center for a New American Security (3) and the OECD (4) have climate change could induce: mass immigration, crop failures, disease, economic crises and international security issues. It’s not just about the sea level.
Kevin Watkins UN Development Report recently said that it require take rich countries to make a 80% reduction in Carbon Dioxide for there to be a fifty-fifty chance of the temperature not rising by 2 degrees (5).
We cannot give up on humanity now. For all the bad things in this world there are at least twice as many good things. The challenges we face together as a species are not insurmountable. We owe it to those generations that have given us our freedom, we owe it to future generations across the world.
Climate change isn’t a war, a great fire or a pandemic. But like all those challenges it requires commitment, strength, creativity and all the technological ingenuity that humanity can muster. In the words of Nelson Mandela. ‘Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation.’
(1) ‘Enjoy Life while you can’, The Guardian, 1 March 2008
(2) ‘Too late to avoid climate change’, The Independent, 19 September 2007
(4) OECD 2008, Environmental Outlook
(5) UNDP, ‘UN Focuses carbon burden’
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Glastonbury Festival Climate Conversations by Gareth on July 1st, 2008
I asked a number of people at the festival what they were doing in their own lives to tackle climate change and also what they found the most difficult.
Green fields at Glastonbury Festival by Gareth on June 29th, 2008
At Glastonbury Festival, The Green Fields provide an environmentally friendly guide to life.
Better Search with Eco-Search by Asi on June 18th, 2008
I just stumbled upon this lovely .
Book Review: How To Turn Your Parents Green
How To Turn Your Parents Green is written by James Russell, illustrated by Øivind Hovland and was supplied by Charlie at Green Books.
Aimed at kids ‘from 8-80′ How To Turn Your Parents Green is a book for a future generation of eco warriors. Presenting the challenge to be green as a battle of the Greens versus the Groans (ungreen adults) the book urging children to become green by fining their parents if they’re not environmentally-friendly.
But it’s more than that, it tries to put the pester power that kids have to good use - turn it away from sweets and candy to switching off the tap and buying local food. And it does this with the help of humorous phrases and great drawings by Øivind Hovland.
Although I make the ludicrous age range for this book, I’m admittedly quite a bit older than those it’s really aimed at. So at first the phrases ‘Ghastly Global Warming’, Hellish Halogens’ and other similarly alliterate and capital lettered ones got on my nerves. But after a while I got used to it and ‘Lazy Train to Chubville’ got me smiling.
While humorous, the book is also informative and it does this cleverly by asking questions but then often making up one of the answers just to make you smile. It nicely explained what a leachate is (rubbish sludge mixed with rainwater) and other facts are presented simply and in a way that a child could easily relate to a parent.
The explanations of subjects like importing fruit from abroad or having a standby button on the TV show how ridiculous they are and that the reader shouldn’t stand for such practices. Luckily it then tells you what you can do about them and gives examples of things done in the past - such as the boy who saved the Severn Beach railway line. Practical examples, goals and checklists make it almost an activity book and even inspired me to do more.
Apart from my initial problem of getting into the book, once you’re used to the style it makes an enjoyable and informative read for all ages. Aimed at kids changing their parents’ habits (fining them for using carrier bags etc), it also has useful tips for turning teachers green and also becoming a green citizen yourself.
Available at from Green Books, How To Turn Your Parents Green costs £6.50, is 91 pages, is printed on Nine Lives recycled paper and published by Tangent Books.
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