The house that 20,000 toothbrushes built | Art and design Duncan Baker-Brown has seen the future of housing – and it's rubbish. "It's a depressing fact," the architect says, "that for every five houses we build in the UK, the equivalent of one house in waste materials gets put into landfill." What makes that even worse is that much of it is still perfectly usable. To prove the point, Baker-Brown and his students at the University of Brighton have just spent a year building a house almost entirely out of garbage. Curling in the midday sun, a scaly surface of rubbery black shingles covers the walls of the two-storey building in the university grounds, like the ruffled plumage of some mysterious fowl. Stepping inside, you find a series of rooms that could pass as a normal home. The same students also made the structural frame of the house, crafting columns and beams from sheets of plywood discarded from site hoardings and concrete shuttering. "All the video rental shops seemed to be closing down while we were on site," he explains.
Connecting the Collaborative Economy Onion Information | Onion Varieties | Onion Prices | Onion Growing notes TheGardenersCalendar.co.uk - Gardening techniques and advice for Vegetable Growers | signup now for our FREE e-newsletter for advice and exclusive competitions - Onion Information Onion Allium cepa Onions can be many shapes, colours and sizes. Moon Planting Type: Root Soil Type: Any Soil Aspect: Any aspect Light: Full Sun Hardiness: Winter Protection Moisture: Well-drained pH: Neutral (6.6 - 7.3) Height: Spread: Onion Growing Notes Sowing Sow seeds under glass in midwinter. Pruning & Thining Thin the onions to 5-10cm distance. Harvesting Harvest onions as and when required. Select a Variety Facebook App - Gardening Actions Let us know what you are doing in the garden at the moment by clicking one of the buttons below to update the Vegetable Garden App on Facebook Onion Varieties List 1 List 2 Onion Seed (Bulb) Sweet Spanish Yellow Round, medium-sized, yellow-brown onions that are so mild-flavoured, sweet and delicious that you can eat them raw like an apple! Onion F1 White Spear Seeds Onion Seed (Bulb) F1 Kamal
How to mend ... an inkjet printer The business model adopted by most manufacturers of inkjet printers is to virtually give away the printer and make their money on replacement ink cartridges. Unfortunately this means that it is very unlikely that a professional repair will be cost-effective, except under warranty. It also creates a strong temptation to throw away your printer and buy a new one as soon as it starts playing up, adding to the problem of e-waste. Nevertheless, there are plenty of things you can do to preserve the life of your printer, and give you years of trouble-free service. Use it or lose it Inkjet printers love to be used. You can also help prevent the print head from drying out by keeping your printer away from sources of heat, such as above your computer, near a radiator, or in direct sunlight. Some printer manufacturers use cartridges with built-in print heads, distinguishable by several dozen gold contacts on the cartridge. Keeping clean Once you start getting streaky prints, it’s time to act.
100 sites pour consommer sans posséder Voici une première tentative (à ma connaissance) de création d’une liste d’initiatives françaises (ou ayant des activités en France) sur la consommation collaborative (voir la définition au bas de cet article). Dans cette liste, le parti pris a été d’indiquer les initiatives relevant des formes nouvelles d’échange entre particuliers (partage, troc, échange, location) ainsi que les nouveaux styles de vie collaboratifs (crowdfunding, coworking, colunching ...) mais aussi des initiatives se situant aux limites du sujet mais qui méritaient d’être mises en avant pour l’innovation sociale qu’elles représentent. N’hésitez pas à apporter vos contributions à cette liste collaborative ! Alimentation Achat groupé direct au producteur * * * * Don / Vente de produits issus de son jardin * * Colunching Livres
Liam Heneghan – On the balance of nature One day this summer my younger son Oisín and I strayed from a heavily wooded trail on the Muckross peninsula in Ireland’s Killarney National Park and entered a narrow limestone cave. The entrance was fringed with vegetation, a pelt of moss on the rock, tendrils of tree roots exposed, so that entering that cave felt like climbing into the bearded mouth of a living thing. We paused a moment in the gloam just as I had done 30 years before, when I visited for the first and only other time. For this is indeed a landscape like few others. The stability of this ancient yew woodland, capable of rebuffing storms, insect outbreaks and other moderate disturbances, embodies an original tenet of ecology going back to the late 19th century. The term ‘balance of nature’ raised the hackles of some scientists as early as the first decades of the 20th century. Perhaps it says unflattering things about me that I felt bored, impatient even, in these minutes waiting for my demise Stories persist. Comments
One-SQM-House The smallest house in the world.For those, who believe, that the world get's better if we build more, buy less.Invented 2012 by Le-Mentzel, Berlin.Watch the official spot Made by Johannes Franke:You want it? Build it! Plans are free. Change the size and make it yours. You need: • 20 meters of wooden timbers (3.4 cm x 3.4 cm) for 250 Euro (300 Dollars) • Wall Coverings (Sperrholz) • 200 Screws • 4 wheels • 1 acryl-glass window • 1 door• 1 day of your lifetime to build itTools:• Screwdriver• (Japanese) SawNo Workshop required. Watch the CNN AnnouncementPublished on 27. Watch the birth of One-Sqm-House at the Guggenheim Lab in Berlin on Canal+ (french TV)Published in April 2013: (Thank you Amy McKinney for sharing this movie)Watch the very first One-Sqm-Houses made for offices on 1TV.ru (Russian News) Published im May 2013: Official Press Pictures by Daniela Kleint (Take it and use it, but respect the credits):High Res Download: here
Helsinki's ambitious plan to make car ownership pointless in 10 years | Cities The Finnish capital has announced plans to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point "mobility on demand" system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car. Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use. Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. To be sure, Helsinki is not proposing to go entirely car-free.
How to Make The Most of Your Yard (Including Weeds!), Permaculture Style Not all the world hates weeds. Sure, there are many gardeners scuffling around in the clogs, cursing those pesky dandelions (actually a highly medicinal plant) and that crabgrass blemishing their flower beds. They offer theories as to how to prevent them, when to get rid of them and, at the weakest and worst moments, may even spray a little agent orange, aka Roundup, to kill them dead, dead, dead. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s right. Step 1: More Garden, Less Grass The first and most exciting step of making your yard work for you is getting rid of the grass and making a garden (Here are ten reasons to do it!). The ultimate goal for maximizing your yard would be to have every square foot of it that isn’t a path be a garden bed. Step 2: Weed With a Purpose I’ve come to love weeding because I know that all of the green material collected — all those weeds — will become nitrogen-rich mulch atop my beds. Step 3: Use What You’ve Got — All of It Step 4: Learn the Lay of the Land
Gregg Segal photographs people with a week’s worth of their trash in his series, “7 Days of Garbage.” Gregg Segal The United States has a trash problem. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average American produces more than 4 pounds of garbage per day. That’s more than double the amount produced in 1960, and it’s 50 percent more than the amount produced by Western Europeans. In January, photographer Gregg Segal decided to put some imagery to those numbers. Some of Segal’s subjects volunteered to be a part of the project because they believed in the idea behind it. Segal used natural materials to transform his yard into artificial environments, like a forest floor or a sandy beach or a body of water, where he photographed all his subjects. Naturally, some people had some hesitation about lying in garbage. Segal posed for a photo, too, with his wife and son. Segal’s work is included in this year’s edition of The Fence in Brooklyn.
PostCapitalism: Envisaging a Shared Future | Keithpp's Blog St Paul’s Cathedral Paul Mason signing PostCapitalism Paul Mason discussing PostCapitalism, the conclusions of a shared economy not the analysis, at St Paul’s in the City of London, under the auspices of St Paul’s Institute. St Paul’s within the heart of the City of London. A couple of years ago, Occupy were camped outside offering a different narrative. Capitalism is a complex system. Below St Paul’s, lies a Roman Temple dedicated to Diana. The Roman Temple was built by military occupiers, probably using slave labour. Capitalism is not set in stone, though the City of London would have us believe so. Capital used to finance innovation, invest in productive systems, this generated wealth, from which we all benefited. Post-WWII we had growth through the 1950s and 1960s. We are seeing boom and bust, bubbles, but no real growth. Marxist Theory of Value, land, capital and labour, determines price. We have global monopolies, the like of which we have never seen. But this is not sustainable.
herbalrootszine Auf Ozeanen schwimmt weniger Plastikmüll als vermutet Zuerst die gute Nachricht: Die Menge der weltweit auf den Ozeanen schwimmenden Plastikabfälle wird offenbar überschätzt. Das ist das Ergebnis aus Tausenden Wasserproben, die während der spanischen Expedition Malaspina 2010 auf Gewässern weltweit entnommen wurden. Die auf der Wasseroberfläche treibende Abfallmenge liege wohl zwischen 7000 und 35.000 Tonnen, schreiben die Wissenschaftler im Fachblatt "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". Die vergleichsweise niedrigen Zahlen überraschen. "Zahlen aus den Siebzigerjahren über die schwimmenden Plastikmengen sind hundertmal größer als unsere aktuellen Schätzungen", schreiben Andrés Cózar von der Universidad de Cádiz und seine Kollegen. Wohin gelangt die Mikroplastik? Es zeigte sich jedoch, dass die Menge von Partikeln im Millimeter- und Mikrometerbereich geringer war, als die Forscher erwartet hatten. Welcher Prozess welche Rolle beim Verschwinden der Mikropartikel hat, wissen die Forscher nicht. News verfolgen
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