Month: March 2017

A Water Bottle to Help Others Drink

- Adam Clare

In too many places around the world potable water is hard to get, and a recent fundraising campaign is trying to change that. Brita teamed up with Me to We to sell a water bottle that will help pay for a drinking well in rural Kenya. It’s key that the bottle they’re selling is reusable – not one of those one-off disposable bottles.

Bottled water is a ridiculous commodity in places where tap water is drinkable, like Canada. If you regularly drink bottled water in communities with drinkable tap water – please stop buying bottled water! It’s not as well regulated as tap water and it’s insanely wasteful. The Globe and Mail published a great article outlining the troubles of bottled water and the culture around drinking it.

Today is world water day and it’s about time to commit to stop drinking water from an inefficient source.

So instead of throwing money at a wasteful bottle of water get yourself a reusable one you can fill from a tap.

The statement bottle, on sale starting March 1st is part of Brita® Canada’s continuing partnership with WE, an organization that brings people together and gives them the tools to change the world. Their joint pursuit of sustainable change shows through initiatives like Filter for Goodâ„¢ where every purchase of a Brita specially-marked ME to WE product supports a borehole in Irkaat, Kenya, which provides the community of more than 1,800 with access to clean water.
…
According to the United Nations, over 80 per cent of wastewater generated by society flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused and 1.8 billion people get their drinking water from a source contaminated with feces which puts them at risk of contracting disease like cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio. Globally, unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene kill 842,000 people in a year.

Read more.

This River is a Person in New Zealand Law

- Adam Clare

The Whanganui River its the first river to have the same legal stats as a person. The New Zealand federal government recently passed a bill granting the river legal personhood. This means that the river is afforded all the rights as a person under New Zealand law. The river’s rights to clean air, legal representation, and other protections people get are now granted to the river itself. This will protect not just the river, it also represents a change in how NZ thinks about the law.

With progress and time we should see other natural entities be granted the same protection as humanity in other jurisdictions.

Long revered by New Zealand’s Maori people, the river’s interests will now be represented by two people.
The Maori had been fighting for over 160 years to get this recognition for their river, a minister said.
“I know the initial inclination of some people will say it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality,” said New Zealand’s Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.
“But it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies.”
The Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third-longest, will be represented by one member from the Maori tribes, known as iwi, and one from the Crown.
The recognition allows it to be represented in court proceedings.

Read more.
Thanks to Delaney!

Building the WikiHouse of the Future

- Adam Clare

housing
Affordable housing is a problem for every country and over the years there have been initiatives to lower the cost of being a home, today some of those are efforts in digitization. The WikiHouse project is all about lowering the cost to design a house by providing people the files needed to plan and build their new home. The cost of construction is obviously up to where the house is built. The goal is to lower the capital costs through the digitization of knowledge.

Their mission:

  1. To put the design solutions for building low-cost, low-energy, high-performance homes into the hands of every citizen and business on earth.
  2. To use digitisation to make it easier for existing industries to design, invest-in, manufacture and assemble better, more sustainable, more affordable homes for more people.
  3. To grow a new, distributed housing industry, comprising many citizens, communities and small businesses developing homes and neighbourhoods for themselves, reducing our dependence on top-down, debt-heavy mass housing systems.

Read more.

Beijing Replacing Gas Taxi Fleet with Electric Taxis

- Adam Clare

small car

Smog and Beijing go hand in hand due to the explosive growth of car ownership and poor environmental management. That’s starting to change. China’s capital city has mandated that when any new taxi hits the street that it has to be electric. This follows their efforts to replace their buses with an all electric fleet, which included putting 100,000 electric busses on the roads. This electrification will make huge strides in better air quality and advancing the electric car market.

All newly added or replaced taxies in the city of Beijing will be converted from gasoline to electricity, according to a draft work program on air pollution control for Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and surrounding areas in 2017.

This is expected to create a market worth nine billion yuan (1.3 billion US dollars).

One expert says that such plan will not only make great contribution to environmental protection, but will drive the development of the new-energy vehicle industry.

Read more.

Use Technology to Mobilize Your Community

- Adam Clare

computer screen
The current federal leadership in the USA has many people concerned about their rights and freedoms. If you’re one of those people you can use these technological tools to help you stand up and fight back. Newsweek, rather surprisingly, compiled a list of tech tools that can be used to mobilize communities or be used to fund campaigns you support. As always, be sure to protect your online privacy and maybe even your in-person privacy. With the recent revelation of the Vault 7 leaks to Wikileaks it’s more important than ever before to speak up and stay safe.

Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants aims to take down what it calls “racist” websites by attacking their ad dollars. Since many companies rely on programmatic advertising, they might not be aware of what sites their ads appear on. Thus, Sleeping Giants notifies companies, requesting that they take action and block the offending websites, or risk alienating their customers. So far, they claim over a thousand brands have committed to removing their ads from such sites.

5 Calls
This app aims to get even the most phone-shy people to call their elected representatives daily. 5 Calls automates the process, providing numbers to officials based on the user’s location and offers easy scripts to follow. It’s available on Apple and Android devices. If only there was an app like this for calling one’s parents.

Read more.

Scroll To Top