Julia Novy-Hildesley of the Lemelson Foundation gives a nice talk here at 9mins 45 sec.

Lemelson is targeting populations where individuals earn <$2/ day.

She highlights projects with:
E+CO – Nonprofit, provided grant and loan. Launched 3 new solar entrepreneurs in Tanzania. 7 new entrepreneurs in 2010.

IDEAAS - in Brazil. Bringing solar home lighting system that worked in more affluent areas to the Amazon. Working in 8 villages with 120 families, all have paid loans on time. Reaching 2000 families by end of next year. Link to Lemelson page.

SELCO – Forprofit. Grant, loan and equity investment. New innovation center to complement existing technologies. Eg. solar headlamps for midwives and for women who were picking roses and tea leaves at night to get the highest price at market. Now reaching 30k people per year in India.

Envirofit – Nonprofit, provided grant. Working in South East Asia – Philippines. Motorcycle taxis emit more than the global feet of cars. A retrofit.

Emergence Bioenergy – For profit, loan and grant. Raised $1.2M in equity, launch in Bangladesh. Village-based power center, 3 entrepreneurs. Sell power to community.

With the Dead Sea dying, the City of Venice sinking, and Las Vegas’s desert oasis faltering, it’s pretty easy to find examples of our mismanagement of water.

Considering that we are ourselves about 60% water and that the leading cause of death worldwide is water-related, it’s surprising that we don’t devote more time to managing this major natural resource.

In each of the cases listed above, the solution governments are posing seem far more complex than the simple, more direct solution: Draining the Red Sea to fill the Dead Sea (as its tributary, the Jordan River, gets sucked dry for irrigation and drinking water). Build massive water gates to defend against the “rising water” (as the people continue to deplete the underground aquifer for drinking water.) Blah blah.

Usually, the best design solutions are simple. Not to say they are easy. Reaching simplicity is often far greater of challenge.

One thing’s for certain – we are good at changing our environment, but not always to suit our needs.

Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

PBS Link on Venice sinking
BBC YouTube video on Dead Sea drying

Vestal long time friend, Holmes Hummel presents a climate change policy lecture.
http://www.holmeshummel.net/

• Congrats to Holmes, now at the US Dept of Energy!

Victor Kaonga points us to Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, a Malawian, who has built a prototype power source made specifically for Africa. It generates power using sugar and yeast for up to 8 hours at a time.

Link »

The design, above, displays company size (by market capitalization) as relative “tread” size; that is, General Electric and Google are large companies. Color (green,yellow,red) corresponds to climate performance, as does the size of the typeface. Therefore Starbucks, which is a relatively small company, is shown in large text size and with a green colored tread. We did 2 shirts each in 2 color schemes.

The intention is not for users to derive hard numbers from this, but the meaning behind the shirt makes for a good talking point and is a quick way to look up climate performance without looking like a dense table of data. We also wanted to make a shirt which people would want to wear. We’re getting a pile of these on top of our fee so we can strut around wearing our own design.

GreenVolts, Inc., based in San Francisco, was founded in 2005 to deliver solar power at fossil fuel costs. Through low cost and high efficiency, GreenVolts can access large markets previously inaccessible to solar power. GreenVolts changes the economics of solar energy.

Please check it out! We welcome any feedback.

Freestyle Walking: No longer just a euphemism for your friend falling on their face! Check out this great new video for RJD2’s “Work it Out.” (click image above) While just plain cool, reading the blurb from the YouTube page is simply inspiring:

Bill Shannon who was born with a degenerative hip condition. His legs cannot carry his own weight and so he has lived a life on crutches. He has developed a new way of moving through life on his skateboard and the crutches.

At our current rate of consumption, the human population can similarly not “carry its own weight” and is leaving a massive ecological footprint. In the same way this young man has “developed new ways of moving through life,” I think we should jump on the problems at hand as opportunities to develop something just as creative and unique. Just look at the neat design of those crutches! They look a lot more like fun than a necessity. Solving climate change and a host of other green problems should leave us with the same fly-high kind of feeling. So let’s do this thing in style.

Link to Bill Shannon’s website
Link to video

See Also: Hip Hop 1930s Remix, Roykopp’s Diagram Music Vid, World Changing Book

Here’s some food for thought as we go into the 3rd week of my look into packaging: What if packaging design was just a little more considered?

Could our sidewalks and road-sides be free of bottle caps and cigarette packs? Maybe our gutters wouldn’t be clogged with plastic bags and blister packs. Perhaps our oceans might have one less gigantic garbage patch.

I’m a fan of Clif Bar’s recent effort to keep litter in its place. The Litter Leash is a pretty clever little piece of design (it’s covered by two utility patents).

Its elegant design inspires me. It’s so simple, effective and “obvious,” yet unmatched. Now, it’s by no means perfect, but in essence, the litter leash takes a step to build a mental connection between litter and the environment and makes the user take responsibility for this tiny piece of trash.

Futureproofed might be a good word for it… What inspires you?

Patent 6,702,462
Patent 6,244,467

Yup, that’s right. The fun, ‘how-to’ Instructables group is teaming up with magazine Popular Science and environmental blog Treehugger to host a contest encouraging folks to post instructions on how to do things greener. We here at Vestal are super excited to see what inventive stuff folks come up with. Most posts on Instructables already use affordable and recycled materials and show impressive resourcefulness, so it’ll be fun to see what people do when given this specific task. We’ll be sure to update y’all on the stuff we thought was neat. But hurry, you only have until Aug 19th to post!

Link to Contest

See Also: Solar Oven from Reflector, Plastic Bag Wallet, Make Your Own (Real) Diamonds

During a trip to China, I was shocked to find a Coke can with a ring pull tab (also known as a rimple). For those of you who are not familiar with the ring pull, it’s probably because they haven’t been very widely used for decades now. (They were phased out of use in the 80’s due to sharp edges and the tendency for the tabs to be casually tossed aside and become litter.)

In 1975, Dan Cudzik patented the ubiquitous “stay-tab” which offered a safer and more environmentally responsible solution which we now find on virtually every aluminum beverage can. The design is delightfully simple and keeps the tab attached to the can unless the user intentionally breaks the tab free.

So, when I found this can, I thought it was rather odd that the multi-national Coca-Cola corporation would use this arguably less responsible packaging solution in China. My guess is that this type of packaging is fractions of a cent cheaper to manufacture, providing financial savings to Coca-cola. However, given the undesirable traits of the ring pull, this would imply that the executives at Coca-cola make the conscious and deliberate decision to use an obsolete, dangerous and environmentally irresponsible packaging solution to increase profits at the expense of the public good. I find this juxtaposition of 44 year-old pull tab technology with modern boy-band, pop-icon graphics quite unfortunate.

Link to 1963 Ring-pull Patent
Link to 1975 Stay-tab Patent