Green Thing Blog

Online you can find like-minded communities for pretty much everything under the sun. Say you're looking for love with post-war human cannonballs from the north-east of England, chances are you'll find it on the Web.

It's hardly surprising then that green dating sites are springing up like tulips in springtime. For instance, Green-Passions caters to the “'tree hugger looking to meet other eco-friendly singles”; Planet Earth Singles wants to help you meet your environmentally-aware "life partner"; while Green Singles connects you with the right hearts and minds based on your true "shade of green".

This is particularly handy in America where eco-conscious folk are apparently 49% more likely than the average joe or joesephine to use online dating sites to find romance . At least, according to something called the Green Consumer Index (GCI) which "identifies U.S. households with high environmental concern who currently practice sustainable consumerism."

This kind of suggests to me that either a) earth-loving folk in America tend to be socially awkward geeks who prefer online interaction; or b) that there just aren't enough singles in their neighbourhood who share their passion for the planet.

Either way, we hope they find true green love this Valentine's Day - as long as while they're doing the romantic thing, they remember to do the green thing and go easy on the population growth thing.

PS. If no-one's invented any eco-friendly condoms yet (they'd be made of some kind of impermeable seed paper surely ;-), it's only a matter of time.

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If you’re passionate about inspiring the people around you to do the green thing we’d love your steer on a new service we want to develop.

We want your help developing a new way for people to inspire their friends and family and colleagues to lead a greener life. We're recruiting a small group of beta testers and we’d really like to get you involved.

What you can do
1. We're getting together in central London to discuss how Green Thing can be better for you. If you can walk, bike, hop, skip or skate to Wyoming Studios in Oxford Circus in October we'd love you to join us. We'll ask you about your ideas, see what you think about some of ours, and we can all eat sandwiches and drink beer.

If you can make it, please email me at andrew (dot) sleigh [at] gmail (dot) com to let me know. Further details will follow. If you’ve got a preferred date or time, that would be good to know too.

2. If you can't make it but would like to input by email or on the phone, please get in touch as well.

3. Maybe you don't want to talk at all, or eat sandwiches or drink beer, but there’s one thing you know in your heart of hearts we could do better? Then please feel extremely free to leave a comment below.

Thanks --Andrew

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I first began working on the Future Tents project at the end of May 2010, by researching various biodegradable materials as well as conducting plenty of research to see what eco tents currently existed on the market.  The next step was to begin sketching out various ideas that made use of different biodegradable materials.  I quickly realised that folded cardboard would be the best and most visually attractive method of achieving the tent I wanted.

Now that I had a better idea of what kind of tent I would design, it was time to begin prototyping with paper.  The more I folded, the more I realized that I was actually creating an origami tent, which meant I needed to find someone who was knowledgeable in this traditional art form.

I contacted Mark Bolitho, the secretary of the British Origami Society to see if he would be interested in giving me a hand.  He agreed and met me at my studio where we spent an entire day folding and experimenting with various paper structures.

I then chose the folded frameworks I thought were best suited to the project and began folding larger structures out of cardboard.  These new prototypes were approximately 1/3 of the eventual finished version.  From there, I was able to see which of the three was the most structurally sound.

The next step was to fold the better of the three models at a larger scale (1/2 of the eventual finished version), and see if it could withstand rain and bad weather. I was also aware that I would need to use more than one sheet of cardboard, which would mean the tricky part would be to reinforce points where the two halves joined.  Finally, I applied beeswax to the whole tent to offer some waterproofing.

While the tent was outside testing the fluctuating London weather, I got to work on the design for the Future Tents logo with Naresh Ramchandani. The final design was sent to the printers and made into a stamp.

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Finally a use for urine. Before you dismiss this as disgusting, just think for a moment about the facts. Individuals produce 1-2 litres a day, collectively, people produce over 10 billion litres of urine every day- not to mention animals. To treat urine in our water supply is very energy intensive. Plus, there's a lot of it to go around ;)

Shanwen Tao, Rong Lan and John Irvine have come up with a use for urine- convert it to energy. The team have been developing a fuel cell that can produce electricity directly from urine. The urine (more specifically urea) is a great alternative to hydrogen or methanol, the substances currently used to generate energy in fuel cells.

Watch this space- urine could be the renewable material of choice for the future.

(Spotted on Gizmodo)

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