Greenpeace has a very nicely designed site to pressure Apple into becoming more environmentally aware. The site is called â??I love my Mac. I just wish it came in green.â??
The focus of the campaign is a letter-writing action where we all email Steve Jobs and tell him we want to be more green. We want the design without the major guilt of raping the environment.
Read the information at iTox & iWaste then join the campaign to persuade Steve to go greenâ?¦
When Europe strengthens legislation against toxic waste a sad side effect is the fact that exporting our poisonous mess to countries with less ability to enforce such legislation. Read the detailed reports of the toxic waste trade and the Panamanian flagged ship, the Probo Koala, in Der Spiegel and Greenpeace.
The Probo Koala scandal deals with a load of highly toxic waste. Discharging it in Europe was too costly. Therefore the company and crew dumped the waste on less regulated shores of West Africa. The result was seven dead and more than 40,000 in need of medical help. The government fell earlier this month as a result of the scandal. (via Other Bhopals).
After dumping its deadly cargo on the poor and unprotected the ship sailed to Europe and recieved a clean bill of health. On monday Greenpeace sailed alongside the ship with their vessel Arctic Sunrise up alongside the tanker in Paldiski, Estonia sprayed the slogan ‘Toxic Trade Kills‘ on the tanker and preventing it from leaving.
(via The Orchid)
The London Science Museum has an exhibition called Dead Ringers, which is on the uses and abuses of discarded mobile phones. It includes some interesting information online. The exhibition goes beyond the simplistic statistics of our rapidly growing mountains of discarded IT stuff.
Beyond more traditional ideas of using specially made biodegradable materials and the idea of re-cycling our gadgets on interesting idea is the use of pasta to make circuit boards.
Naturally pasta is biodegradable but it also comes with an additional advantage. Since pasta quickly becomes soft when boiled it is easy to remove components which are attached to the pasta circuit board. This makes the job of re-cycling components more cost efficient and more attractive.
Is there a catch?
Naturally this is not all good. No, the concern is not that food production will be diverted to gadget-making but we do focus more on gadgets than on more basic necessities. The problem is that presenting solutions such as biodegradable materials relaxes concerns. We can collectively shrug and claim that the problem has been solved. This is not so. There remains a missing component for this to be true. We need harsher regulation to enforce rules demanding manufacturers use more biodegradable material in their gadgets. Market solutions would be a nice option but have proven in the past to be ineffective.
More on high tech trash here & here.
This is not a fashion blog. I have no intention of attempting to bore you with pictures of what I am currently wearing (or not wearing) but I want to share with you my latest purchase.
In April I wrote a short entry about the growing problems of high-tech trash. One way of understanding the problems is to look at Chris Jordan‘s photographs of our discarded tech-junk. Take a look at the piles of cell phone chargers or the sea of cell phones. These photographs show how quickly yesterday’s technology of desire becomes tomorrows garbage – and next weeks environmental crisis.
There seem to be few solutions to what we should be doing with our discarded high-tech junk but some companies are working on small scale remedies to the problem. Recellular is a company that buys and sells used mobile telephones in bulk. While this does not really prevent high-tech junk it at least ensures that we get the most milage out of our technology before it ends up in the pile.
Obviously a good first step, but what do we do next?
The flat screen TV trend shows no sign of diminishing in either Sweden or the UK. According to this article in the Guardian Online a flat screen TV is sold every 15 seconds in the UK. The problem is that the flat screen plasma can use up to four times as much electricity as the old-style cathode-ray tube models.
If we connect this with our other home entertainment trends (set-top boxes, digital video recorders, DVD players etc) home consumption of electricity is on the rise.
Dr Joseph Reger, chief technology officer at Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Munich, Germany, said: ‘If all the [plasma] TVs were on at the same time, you would need something that produces 2.5 gigawatts. That can be done today with around two nuclear power stations.’
The discussion in Sweden is changing slowly but the main thrust of the energy policy has been to close nuclear reactors for safety reasons and fossil fuel based producers for environmental reasons. As a reaction Sweden is buying more energy from other countries. In particular from low-cost Eastern European countries. Which means that either we move the polution out of sight or we attempt to place the nuclear risks in countries which may not be able to afford to be too particular.
As usual someone else is paying the initial price of our consumption. Eventually the bad news will reach our shores.
Three 12-year olds were arrested in the UK for breaking some branches while climbing a cherry tree. The three children were climbing a cherry tree when the police came and carted them off to the police station. The children had their pictures taken for mug-shots, DNA samples were taken and finally they had their shoes removed before being made to wait in police cells for two hours before being released.
Naturally I believe that trees deserve protection but this is ridiculous. The children now have criminal records which will be stored for five years. Also the DNA samples will not be destroyed after the five years (unless the UK has special rules for minors & DNA).
The word proportionality is very popular right now – it should be applied more often…
(via Daily Mail)
Hey â?? remember the cold war? Itâ??s over right? When a war ends it would be nice if the warring factions could pick up all their stuff and move it back to were it belongs. Despite this (obvious?) point the US maintains 480 nuclear weapons in Europe (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey). Formally these are NATO but they are owned and controlled by the US. It would be really nice if the US would take them back home.
The weapons are placed on European soil and if anything goes wrong the damage will be carried by Europeans. They were designed as a deterrent â?? at least that was what we where told the arms race was for. So now that there is no major power to deter (if there ever was a need for nuclear deterrent) please take the crap off our front lawn.
Why not do something really wild and make Europe a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone?
Greenpeace has more information and also a fun video â??Nato Big Brotherâ?? â?? after the video you are asked to vote whom should leave.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) released its report entitled Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms read about the report launch here.
Commission Chairman Dr. Hans Blix presented it [the report] to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the UN Headquarters in New York, and thereafter to the President of the United Nations General Assembly, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Mr. Jan Eliasson, to whom Dr. Blix expressed his and the Commissionâ??s gratitude to the Swedish Government for having established and assumed the main financial responsibility of the WMDC.
The report calls for (amongst other things) the removal of nuclear arms in Europe.
The report clearly states that the nuclear weapon states are in breach of their Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment to disarm and “no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously – even though this was an essential part of the NPT bargain, both at the treaty’s birth in 1968 and when it was extended indefinitely in 1995.”
That’s the kind of thing we have been saying for decades – but which rarely features in the UN Security Council, dominated as it is by the five permanent members, all of whom possess nuclear weapons. Far from disarming, they’re actually upgrading their arsenals.
The report also observes:
While the reaction of most states to the treaty violations was to strengthen and develop the existing treaties and institutions, the US, the sole superpower, has looked more to its own military power for remedies. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 made it clear that the US would feel free to use armed force without authorization of the United Nations Security Council to counter not only an actual or imminent attack involving WMD but also a WMD threat that might be uncertain as to time and place.
Download and read the full report here.
(via Real Peter Forsberg)
I replaced my iPod yesterday after the total collapse of my last one. Today I read about the iSweatshops. The iPods are assembled in China by mainly female workers. The workforceâ?¦
â?¦resides in “iPod cities” with as many as 200,000 employees. Outsiders are forbidden, and 15-hour workdays are the norm. As you might expect, the wages are low, even for China. (Foreign Policy).
Tomorrow I will fly to Barcelona to participate in the GPLv3 conference besides being an event that I am looking forward to, the privilege of visiting foreign cities is one I value. Recently the discussion on environmental damage caused by flights has taken speed â?? especially with the rapid rise of cheap tickets which increases our â??unnecessaryâ?? flights.
Monbiot writes: â??Flying kills. We all know it, and we all do it.“
Monbiot is referring to the environmental effects of flying. He claims (convincingly) that while most of our reliance on fuels causing carbon emissions can be reduced without a too serious limitation to our freedom â?? this does not apply to flying. Reducing carbon emissions caused by flying means reducing the number of flights we take.
Both these arguments (iSweatshops & flying) have something important in common. They both bring into question things I appreciate. The question that must be posed from this information is â?? what shall I do about it?
When bringing this information to people he meets Monbiot writes of the listeners response: â??They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.â??
The first impulse may be the ostrich approach â?? by sticking oneâ??s neck into the sand the bad news can be ignored. This approach should not be ignored â?? it works surprisingly well and is applied successfully by many. I tried this for a while â?? unfortunately it eventually wears thin. Another approach is self-denial. A no-excuses approach to technology and flights. This entails limiting everything to the bare necessities â?? without allowing for rationalisations. This involves denying oneself of many of the things that I appreciate â?? not an easy approach.
Can there be a middle-of-the-road approach? Is awareness better than ignorance? This argument would mean that our knowledge of the harm our choices entail legitimises our actions even if this has no real effect on physical events (better working conditions or environment). As much as I would like this, I cannot believe this is a solid approach to improvement.
The answer? Donâ??t look at me. I believe it is better to be aware than ignorant of the harm I do â?? even if this cannot mitigate the harm.
