The Earth Awards

The Earth Awards are taking place this September and is designed to be a platform to showcase the latest in all things innovative and ecological from across the globe. They pride themselves on being ‘committed to the idea of popularising the most viable of [each years] most viable innovations and transforming them into market ready solutions’.

They have six innovation categories:

- The Built Environment
- Products
- The Future
- Systems
- Fashion
- Social Justice

With innovations fitting into one of six criteria:

- Ecological
- Original
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Useful
- Scalable

With winners in each category winning $10,000 and the grand prizewinner receiving $50,000.

Overall they encourage some pretty smart ecological solutions to 21st Century problems. Check out what last year’s winning innovation was here.

Hand-Me-Downs. Love It.

I must admit, I rather love some of the ethical clothing companies out there with attractive little websites that make me want to buy half of the stuff on them, same the stuff is so expensive just because it’s ethical or environmentally friendly. But all that aside, I still love them and I’ve stumbled upon my favourite so far.

The site Howies has a section named ‘handmedown’ naturally I was curious and well thought I’d check it out. The concept is genius.

Some of the clothes they make have the Hand Me Down label as they’ve been made and designed specifically to last a lifetime, or to be more specific, at least live to be passed from one generation to the next. So it’s clothes recycling without having to ever part with your favourite items and give them to someone you know will love it just as much as you have. I really like that idea, especially if it gets passed from father to son or mother to daughter or even onto your oldest and bestest friend. I swear it’s the sentiment in me = ]

At the moment they only make hand me down jackets and bags but who knows what they’ll branch out into next? The real downside though is the cost, who has a spare £400 knocking around for a jacket?! But I guess it is made to last….

Infographic for Conservation Department Figures

Since the article about the Council’s Conservation Department cut-backs I wrote for Birmingham Recycled I sent another FOI request asking for some internal figures regarding the departments budget for the last 10 years.

They finally got back to me on the 19th May, but could only supply me to with estimated department figures for the last six years. They also sent me an excel of figures regarding spending on refurbishment etc. for historical sites and Birmingham museums that come under the care of the Council’s Conservation group.

So in short, I had a go at making an infographic as a nice visual way of viewing the figures that got set to me. To check out the on for the departments budgets click here. I’m going to have a go at making one for the other numbers I’ve got, see if I can make sense of it all, so if you’re interested keep checking here to see what I’ve done.

This website puts things into perspective a bit…

While I was perusing the internet for all things green related, I stumbled upon this site and well, to put it frankly, I felt more than a little bit shocked at the statistics.

The website is called breathing earth and it consists of a map of the world and it’s an up-todate- second by second visualisation of CO2 emissions and birth and death rates across the world. It’s both fascinating and frightening all at the same time and well if it doesn’t captivate you, hold your attention and make you think twice then there is definitely something wrong with you.

The part of the site that’s that puts it all into perspective the most though is the ‘count-up’ subtitled ‘since you started watching’ that rapidly counts how many people have been born, died and how much CO2 is being emitted globally while your on the site. While I’ve been writing this blog, almost 4,000 people have been born, almost 2,000 people have died and almost 900, 000 tonnes of CO2 have been emitted and i’ve only been on the site for no more then 12 minutes!

Other features of the site allow you to scroll over different countries to see their individual statistics. This site is truly something to behold.

A much needed update

I know, I’m neglectful and I’m not going to make excuses I’ve just been putting blogging and a few other Online Journalism associated things on the back-burner while I’ve attempted to get other Uni work done.

So, just a relatively short blog, updating things I’ve leant since I last blogged about my classes because sniff, sniff Online Journalism classes have come to an end.

Right, firstly a few weeks ago we had a guy called Graham Holliday came in he is part of the BBC College of Journalism and he currently resides in Rwanda as a social media dabbler and media consultant where he also runs the online news blog Kigali Wire. Really nice guy who taught us lots about different easy to use and free social media sites for getting our work out on the world wide web in as many places as possible. Some of these sites include:

- pixelpipe – easy way of publishing video and photos etc.
- tubemogul – strictly video content only. Good for video linking and video sharing.
- bit.ly or tinyurl – URL shorteners, very handy for sharing links on twitter seen as it only lets you have 140 characters per tweet…
– publish2 – bit like delicious, good for bookmarking useful sites and sharing them with others and people in your network.
- Twitter – naturally…

If you fancy checking out anymore of his stuff then you can look at his blog check out his pictures from life around Rwanda on flickr or follow him on Twitter @noodlepie

Right next up, we had Karen Strunks a lovely freelance photographer who’s local to the Birmingham area, as in she works here, who set up the innovative 4am Project. The 4am Project started off with people from Birmingham sending pictures of the city at you guessed it, 4am, however it soon took off and now the project has photos from all over the world never mind just across Britain, capturing cities and sights at 4am.

She took us through the process of setting up a project and then actually following it through and keeping it running. At the moment there are around 40 countries involved in the project and and 4,500 images that have been submitted since she started the project in 2008.

I think it’s a really cool idea and some of the photos are amazing. If you want to check out the 4am project you can see the images on flickr. You can check out her website for lots of useful photography tips. Follow her and the 4am Project on Twitter @karenstrunks and @4amproject

As for what i’ll now be doing considering Online Journalism class is over, I’ll still be blogging, tweeting and bookmarking of course = ]

‘Up-cycled’ Handbags

I’ve discovered a fun yet brilliant website that ‘up-cylcles’ rubbish like crisp packs and sweet wrappers into pretty groovy handbag’s. The website is called Ecoist and they turn this street littering, land-fill consuming waste into useable, unique and stylish handbags.

They pretty much have every style of bag you can think of included, shoulder bags, clutches, totes and across the body ones. I pretty much love them and think they’re a really clever idea so I thought I’d see what other cute, practical and stylish eco-friendly handbags I could find because handbags, along with shoes, are my one weakness…. So here are some I like and well just have a look for yourselves, they are badly priced and you never know you might find one you like and help to make the world a less rubbish filled place.

– The Guardian Newspaper has it’s own EcoStore. Bet you didn’t know that, well I didn’t anyway…. Personal favourite bag on the site.

– Hippy Shopper, great name I know. (I think I’d have made a good hippy as well I adore hippy stuff a little more than one probably should….)

- Fashion-Conscience A lot more expensive than the other ones, but if you’ve got the money, love to shop and want to help the planet at the same time, then why the hell not?!

I think I could quite happily spend my days looking at these bags and lusting after most if not all of them.

Online Video

Yesterday’s class was all about online video. We had a lovely guest speaker called Sarah Booker who is Web Editor for the Worthing Herald, all round nice lady and social networking nut.

Along with Paul Bradshaw, our ever handy Online Journalism lecturer, she gave us some top tips on how to get the most out of online video for Journalism and showed us some frankly mortifying examples along the way.

It was an all round good class, resulting in plenty of laughs, a ‘stream off’ between Paul and Sarah as to which mobile streaming application was fastest Qik or (the one I can’t remember the name of), our attempts to knock up a quick video piece given flip camera’s and 20mins editing time we all did pretty well for a first attempt and Mr Bradshaw’s wise words of advice about not being shy when we have to appear in our own video; ‘We’re all ugly, get used to it’.

So instead of just regurgitating their top tips for video I thought I’d provide my own with the aid of a website I found.

- Keep it relatively short, people don’t have great attention spans at the best of times.

- Make it personal, use the age old rule of photography and general framing of shots the ‘rule of thirds’, intimacy is key.

- Don’t just point and shoot, make sure you’ve got an interesting as possible background, person and actually making something people might be interested it watching.

- If you’ve got the unsteadiest hands in the world, save yourself the embarrassing playback, and use a tripod.

- Doesn’t have to be great quality, as long as it’s viewable it’s fine. Often it’s more authentic this way, particularly when reporting on location, shows your actually there. Hence why little flip cameras are so good for this type of Journalism.

- Don’t just film one thing or person, no one wants to watch this, more is less in the sense that you don’t have to use it all.

- Be creative with how you put your content together, play around with different editing techniques, animation, stills, screen grabs etc.

- Always get permission from whoever your filming before sending it out for the world to see, especially in the case where they aren’t the best interviewee. Some people just don’t like infamy…

A good website for inspiration on how to make informative, interesting, quirky and good online videos reporting news stories etc visit Rocketboom and bask in their well put together irony.

Inventive Recycled Gadgetry

Found this very cool post on Mashable, social media guide, website that lists ’10 excellent examples of recycled gadgetry’. They are truly cool and extremely inventive. Who’d have thought to make jewellery from computer keyboard keys or a clock from an old computer screen? Certainly not me.

Other stuff includes:
- A circuit-board table lamp
- Floppy disk notepad
- Casette tape neckties
- Laptop sleeves made of old t-shirts

So what would you make with the inspiration to recycle? Let me know on my comments section.

Check out all the recycled gadgetry on Mashable – links are on the website as to where you can buy any of the products featured.

The WEEE Directive

The Environmental Agency set up the WEEE directive, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, in 2007 with the aim to try and reduce the amount of electrical goods produced and encourage us ordinary folk to recycle, reuse and re-cover all things electrical.

Their main aim is this, to reduce the waste generated from electrical and electronic equipment. But it’s also designed to ensure an improvement in the environmental procedures and processes of all those involved in the life cycle of electrical and electronic products. Sounds good.

Where their directive makes notable good practice though is in an office environment because most if not all of their unwanted electrical equipment used to end up in landfill, naughty, but now they’re no longer able to do this because of the WEEE directive.

As we all know every little helps in the battle to be more energy efficient, help combat climate change and be generally a little greener and manufacturers, sellers and distributors of office equipment are responsible for taking back and recycling electrical and electronic equipment.

It’s Government regulations such as the WEEE directive that help to ensure businesses and manufacturers as well as individuals are doing their bit for the planet.

FOI Request

Finally got a reply to my FOI, Freedom of Information, request to Birmingham City Council today, well done them for not actually taking the full 4 weeks to respond, i’m impressed. I was also pretty happy with the information they provided in response to my questions. In a nut-shell I sent a request asking them for more information on the recent news surrounding conservation department cutbacks within the council and the aforementioned department’s possible closure. Questions were as follows:

1. What types of conservation projects are covered by the department?

2. Why are the cutbacks are being made, especially in areas of significant importance such as conservation and education in Birmingham and the surrounding areas?

3. Why does the conservation department face possible closure. Is this because the work it does and the projects it deals with are considered outdated and no longer important in this day and age?

4. What does the council feel would happen to conservation projects, such as the recent work on the Jewellery Quarter, if the department were to be closed and what would the council put in it’s place to ensure the future conservation of Birmingham and the surrounding areas wildlife, landscape and historic buildings if said department were gone?

Their response was a couple of pages long and they didn’t seem reluctant to give me the information I was looking for, which is always nice, outlining their answers section by section to correspond with my questions.

The only bit I’m a little unhappy with in their response, concerns my last two questions. They seemed to feel they’d answered these in the documents previous section with the ever frustrating ‘see above’ whereas I didn’t feel they were really answered, well not fully anyway. I responded on What Do They Know? that the request was successful, but I might see if I can get some better answers to those last questions. All in all, I’m pleased with what I got though.

Want to read the full response from Birmingham City Council? Download the word document here.